The hunt for the "PROMIS", starts out funky.

I have filed a requist to start a research project on and about the PROMIS software that many "have heard" about, but very few "know" about.

I'm currently moving and have the start of this scheduled for when I find sufficient and capable people to join the research project and after I fully moved and have all my systems at full power.

One of the following days I'll also post a thread to ask who would like to join the research and a summary of your capability's as an ITer or computer enthousiast.

So, now, the last 2 days I've been doing some preliminary research on the subject to establish a firm foundation for the research project to be built on. So I started calling and inquiring information in the biz, called a few douzen people I know, worked with or found names from in relation to PROMIS and also commercialy available software like it.
I also asked around on the net about PROMIS, asking people that already did some research but hit a dead end, if they could share all their data on it.

Then, out of the blue, I got a visit from the police. They said it was a standard survey, but they asked me all sorts of questions that I couldn't imagine a normal "police" survey to include, some of the questions were about what I do on my computers at home, what interests I have in relation to technology, hardware, software and networks.
What they also asked me was "do you have a job, car, own a house, stock or other things".

I don't see what bussines the police has with any of that, the only reason I can see or feel them asking about it is because of me starting with this project more activly then I did before.

I did do some research about Promis, Echelon and other intelligence computer systems in the past, but mainly trough pure documentation, without contacting anyone about it.

So, now I'm even more interested on this subject. If 2 days of asking already gets the police to your door, god knows what'll happen when the research project takes on full power.

Anyway, Iters and computer enthousiasts, with good knowhow and experience, hold tight and hope you join me in my conquest when I officialy announce it.

r/Jan

interesting...

I did a simple google search and found these :

www.csrd.uiuc.edu... - this one says that promise is
"PROMIS is an advanced multilingual and retargetable parallelizing and optimizing compiler under development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Both the basic research work and the development of the prototype compiler are based on a radically different design methodology, in contrast to the design approaches used by virtually all commercial and experimental compilers. "


www.webcom.com... - this one talks about the PROMIS software theft ?

Not sure if this is related to what you're looking for, but worth a try.

Yeah, some stuff can be found on google, but nothing conclusive or detailed enough to explain the happenings around the software and the theory's about its history and use.

If your interested in a project about this, U2U me so we can talk.

I think we need at least 4 people to work on this.

I'll post an announcement thread soon. Propably later today, or tomorrow, I still have to transport about 50 boxes of stuff and some furniture that we prepared.

And we didn't get to prepare even half of the stuff that has to move :'(

Move will be done about end of next week, 4th or 5th of june.

Speaking from an IT standpoint, the stories I saw didn't make any logical sense. They sounded like something made up by someone who wasn't familiar with computers.

Let me state my objections, and you can research those points along with others. My source is here:
www.rense.com...

"The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as Promis - developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads.

This would be some sort of relational database. The data would include who was on what case and provide scheduling as well.

But then we get THIS description of it, which is a completely different piece of software:

The History of "Promis[e]"

Promise software resembles what we know as NCIC, which is software used by police agencies in the U.S., which creates a database with the ability to track or identify individuals. In 1983 under the Reagan administration, Earl Brian, representing the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, contacted Bill Hamilton, owner of "Inslaw". The Justice Department contracted Inslaw to create and later modify the software so that it could be used by Intelligence agencies and another version to be used by financial institutions such as BCCI

And this is a completely DIFFERENT software with different functions. It is a large databasing application. www.fromthewilderness.com...

A purported document from the House Judiciary Committee describes the lawyer caseload database:
www.webcom.com...

Niether of them is very special. Anybody can program this kind of thing. There's no real reason to take an existing system and modify it. To modify it, you need to go through and change all the data structure names and reroute the logic and confirm the business rules and re-design the reports and check the data interfaces. Doing it from an existing system (unless it was using the same databases) is a nightmare.

Been there. Got involved in the coding of that kinda thing. It's faster to do it from scratch.

So we have two different "confirmed" descriptions of the software. That, in itself, is quite suspicious. And yes, reporters have been known to do news stories on things that turned out to be complete lies.

Second "man, that's so WRONG!" point to me is that modifying this software somehow gives bin Laden "the ability to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others, according to sources."

How, pray tell, could caseload software give anyone the ability to monitor electronic banking transactions? You have to actually connect to individual banking groups and get their reports directly. And they have been known to change their software.

As with the rest of the information, we're talking huge databases. Massive databases. Massive *secured* databases that require some confirmation and security policies to get into.

All they have to do to keep bin Laden out is to send out a message "we're changing the passwords and we're demanding verification before we grant your new password." His connection is then toast. No data.

Another quote from the Rense site:

"There is a central locator system to track members of the National Command Authority 24/7. If that is a database created with Promis and if anyone had access you could do it."

If... if... if. That's not a smoking gun, that's a speculation about a water pistol. PROMIS is not a new kind of programming language or database. It's a fully-blown program. So that's kind of like saying "wow... if my Ford pickup truck put together a tour bus, we could get our band on tour."

So I'm not buying it. Speaking as an IT person, the stories I see are full of holes. I do think someone in the Justice department tried to run off with the nice caseload software and I do think there were lawsuits and other issues. But I don't think this caseload software is any more powerful than the Federal Assisted Housing Program that I coded in Dataflex back in 1984. My software was used for a long time, it did exactly what it needed to do, it caught housing frauds and other scams -- but you couldn't tweak it in any way to ... oh... access municipal finance systems and cook their books or get into NCIC and give the names of all the officers.

The speculaton that it is some sort of all-purpose translator of everything is at odds with the description and the notion that it can connect to Air Force 1 seems silly. The only documents that describe PROMIS as some sort of superengineered massive codecracker and information retriever are the ones from the more speculative conspiracy sites.

As I said, all they have to do is change the passwords.

[Edited on 27-5-2004 by Byrd]

Originally posted by thematrix

If your interested in a project about this, U2U me so we can talk.

I'm sorry, but I don't have time to join in. thanks for the offer though, I look forward to reading your research and findings.

To add to the above, a quote about what PROMIS is/does:
www.fromthewilderness.com...

Each had a computer system to track case management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The problem was that they used as many as seven different programming languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA's office in San Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York.

The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that could access files in any number of databases and programming languages and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the Rosetta stone of computer languages.

This betrays the fact that someone has no clue what they are talking about. Conversion packages exist for most data languages. You don't need a genius (or programmer) to write some sort of integration when every databasing language imports and exports at least fixed file structures and comma delimited structures. That's how we exchanged files and databases in the early 1980's.

After that, the software that folks wrote in *always* had import and conversion packages built into them. A regular old programmer can grab your Excel database and sling it into FoxPro or just about anything else you want, including some specialized databases.

I think someone has taken an incident (Justice department reneiging on a contract) and added a factoid to it and come up with a conspiracy.

Originally posted by Byrd
I think someone has taken an incident (Justice department reneiging on a contract) and added a factoid to it and come up with a conspiracy.

Thats exactly why there should and if I have anything to do with it, WILL be a research project about it.

No matter what the outcome is, if we find its some software for lawjers, or if we find that its everything people believe echelon to be x1000.

Without decent and dedicated research on it, we'll never know what it is and what its used for.

Then, the wide variety of descriptions for something called PROMIS, can also mean that theres a solid disinformation campaign around it to keep us from knowing what it is.

So again, a dedicated research can clear this up and give some clarity about it.

I see Byrd that you are or active as an ITer or a rather well trained enthousiast, so if you like to join up in the conquest of what PROMIS really is, please U2U me and well talk.