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INSLAW, Incorported
Company typePrivate
IndustryInformation Technology
FoundedWashington, D.C., U.S. ((1982-03-00)March 0, 1982 invalid day)
FounderWilliam A. Hamilton
HeadquartersWashington, D.C.
ProductsCJIS, MODULAW, PROMIS
Websitehttp://www.inslawinc.com

Inslaw Inc. is a small Washington-based information technology company.

In mid-1970s, it developed Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) for the United States Department of Justice. The principal owners, William A. Hamilton and his wife Nancy, later alleged that the DOJ modified its contract with their company to obtain an enhanced version of PROMIS, but refused to pay for it once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in different federal courts, and to congressional hearings.

Origins

Department of Justice

Inslaw, once called the Institute for Law and Social Research, was a nonprofit business created by William A. Hamilton in mid-1970s. Inslaw's original software product PROMIS was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts.[1] It was funded almost entirely by government funds; and therefore versions created prior to January 1978 were in the public domain. That was when the 1976 amendments to the federal copyright law took effect, which automatically conferred on Inslaw, as the author of PROMIS, the five exclusive software copyright rights, none of which could be waived except by explicit, written waiver. The U.S. Government negotiated licenses to use but not to modify or distribute outside the federal government some but not all versions of PROMIS, created after the January 1978 effective date of the copyright amendments. In 1981 after Congress liquidated the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which had been the primary source of funds for Inslaw's development of PROMIS, the company became known as Inslaw Inc., a for-profit corporation created to further develop and market PROMIS and other PROMIS-derivative software product(s).

The newly created corporation made significant improvements to the original software. The resulting product came to be known alternately as PROMIS '82 or Enhanced PROMIS.

Enhanced PROMIS contract and allegations of theft

In March 1982, the Department of Justice awarded Inslaw Inc. a $9.6 million, three-year contract to implement an older version of PROMIS, which the government had a license to use, in twenty-two of the largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices.

While PROMIS could have gone a long way toward correcting the Department's longstanding need for a standardized case-management system, the contract between Inslaw and Justice quickly became embroiled for over two decades in bitter controversy.[2] The conflict centered on the question of whether the Justice Department owed INSLAW license fees for the 32-bit architecture VAX 11/780 version of PROMIS which the Justice Department obtained in April 1983 at the start of the second year of the three-year PROMIS implementation contract by modifying the contract and promising to negotiate the payment of license fees if the government substituted the new version of PROMIS for the 16-bit architecture PRIME computer version of PROMIS, which was the subject of the original contract.[clarification needed]

Edwin Meese

One month after the April 1983 contract modification, the government began to find fault with some of Inslaw's services, and with negotiated billing rates. The government then began to withhold unilaterally each month increasing amounts of payments due Inslaw for implementation services.[3] The Justice Department agent responsible for making payments was a former Inslaw employee, C. Madison Brewer.[1] According to published reports, "Brewer was aided in his new DOJ job by Peter Videnieks.[nb 1] Videnieks was fresh from the Customs Service where he oversaw contracts between that agency and Hadron Inc., a company controlled by [Ed] Meese[nb 2] and Reagan-crony Earl Brian.[nb 3] Hadron, a closely held government systems consulting firm, was to figure prominently in the forthcoming scandal."[1]

At the same time that the government withheld payments, the government decided to substitute the Enhanced PROMIS for the Old PROMIS originally specified in the contract, claiming that Inslaw had failed to prove to the government's satisfaction that Inslaw had developed the enhanced version with private, non-government funds and that the enhanced version was not otherwise required to be delivered to the government under the contract.[2] Enhanced PROMIS was eventually installed in a total of forty-four federal prosecutors' offices following the April 1983 Modification 12 agreement.

By February 1985 the government had withheld payment of almost $1.8 million for Inslaw's implementation services, plus millions of dollars in Old PROMIS license fees. Inslaw filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.[6]

Elliot Richardson

In his court cases, William Hamilton was represented by several attorneys, one of whom was lawyer Elliot Richardson, formerly the United States Attorney General under President Nixon.

Federal investigations

Two different federal bankruptcy courts made fully litigated findings of fact in the late 1980s ruling that the Justice Department "took, converted, and stole"[nb 4] the PROMIS installed in U.S. Attorneys' Offices "through trickery, fraud, and deceit,"[nb 5] and then attempted "unlawfully and without justification"[nb 6] to force Inslaw out of business so that it would be unable to seek restitution through the courts.[2]

Three months after the initial verdict, George F. Bason, Jr., the federal judge presiding over the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Columbia, was denied reappointment to the bench by the Justice Department, ending a fourteen-year tenure.[nb 7] His replacement, S. Martin Teel, had been the attorney who unsuccessfully argued the Inslaw case before Judge Bason on the Justice Department's behalf.[7][8]

Leigh Ratiner (of Dickstein, Shapiro and Morin, which was the 10th largest firm in Washington at the time) was the lawyer who obtained a favorable ruling for Inslaw Inc.. He was fired in October 1986, reportedly after the Mossad arranged a payment of $600,000 to his former firm, which was used as a separation settlement.[nb 8] In September 1991, the House Judiciary Committee issued the result of a three-year investigation. House Report 102-857: INSLAW: Investigative Report[2] confirmed the Justice Department's theft of PROMIS. The report was issued after the Justice Department convinced the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on a jurisdictional technicality to set aside the decisions of the first two federal bankruptcy courts.[nb 9][9] The House Committee also reported investigative leads indicating that friends of the Reagan White House had been allowed to sell and to distribute Enhanced PROMIS both domestically and overseas for their personal financial gain and in support of the intelligence and foreign policy objectives of the United States.[10][1][11] The Democractic Majority called upon the Attorney General to compensate Inslaw immediately for the harm that the Government had "egregiously" inflicted on Inslaw. The Republican Minority dissented. The Committee was divided along party lines 21—13. The Government ignored the recommendations.

Inslaw Affair divides into two separate issues

On November 13, 1991, Attorney General William Barr appointed a retired federal judge Nicholas J. Bua as Special Counsel to advise him on the allegations that high-ranking officials had acted improperly for personal gain to bankrupt Inslaw.[12] By June 1993 the Bua Report[7] was released, clearing Justice officials of any impropriety.[13] Inslaw's attorney, Elliot Richardson wrote Inslaw's rebuttal with evidence suggesting Bua's report was riddled with errors and falsehoods.[7]

In May 1995 the United States Senate asked the U.S. Court of Federal Claims[nb 10] to determine if the United States owed Inslaw Inc. compensation for the Government's use of PROMIS. On July 31, 1997, writing on behalf of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Judge Christine Miller ruled in favor of the DOJ.[14][15][16]

On the other hand, according to William A. Hamilton, the Government flatly denied during all court proceedings what it later admitted, i.e. that agencies such as the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies used PROMIS to keep track of their classified information.[3]

Later developments

In early 1999 the British journalist and author, Gordon Thomas, published an authorized history of the Israeli Mossad entitled Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. The book quotes detailed admissions by the former long-time deputy director of the Mossad about the partnership between Israeli and U.S. intelligence in selling to foreign intelligence agencies in excess of $500 million worth of licenses to a Trojan horse version of PROMIS, in order to spy on them.[17]

In 2001 the Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement officials familiar with debriefing former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that the convicted spy had stolen copies of a PROMIS-derivative for his Soviet KGB handlers.

Robert Hanssen

They further alleged that the software was used within the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies to track internal intelligence, and was used by intelligence operatives to track international interbank transactions.[18] These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of the same PROMIS-derivative on the Russian black market for $2 million.[19] It was believed then that al Qaeda used the software to penetrate database systems to move funds throughout the banking system, and to evade detection by U.S. law enforcement.[20]

In May 2006 a former aide in the Office of the Vice President of the United States pleaded guilty to passing top-secret classified information to plotters trying to overthrow the president of the Philippines. Leandro Aragoncillo, an FBI intelligence analyst at the time of his arrest, was believed to have operated his deception using archaic database software manipulated by the FBI in order to evade the 1995 U.S. Court of Federal Claims finding with regard to Inslaw's rights to derivative works.[21][3][22] Additionally,

The 9-11 Commission called attention to the fact that the FBI did not install the current version of its case management software, called the ACS (Automated Case Support) system, until October 1995 and [to the fact that ACS was obsolete from the time the FBI developed it in the mid-1990s because it was based on "1980s technology". Although the 9-11 Commission offered no explanation for why the FBI used obsolete technology to develop its ACS case mnagement software in 1995, the apparent explanation is that the FBI simply renamed its 1980s technology case management software, which was called FOIMS and was based on PROMIS, and translated it in October 1995 into a different computer programming language in order to obstruct a court hearing that the U.S. Senate had ordered earlier that year. The Senate had ordered the court in May 1995 to determine whether the United States owes Inslaw compensation for the government's use of PROMIS, and the court, in turn, ordered outside software experts to compare the FBI's software with PROMIS, but the FBI modified its software and told the court that it no longer retained the unmodified first 11 years (1985 through 1995) of its own case management software.] —boxed information added by David Dastych

— William A. Hamilton,"FBI's Incapacitating Cover-Up", Wprost[22]

In 2006 there were further allegations of the misuse of PROMIS. Writing in the Canada Free Press, the former Polish CIA operative and now international journalist, David Dastych alleged that "Chinese Military Intelligence (PLA-2) organized their own hackers department, which [exploited] PROMIS [database systems] [in the] Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories to steal U.S. nuclear secrets"[22]; however, the prima facie value of that allegation was lost in a realization that the U.S. Government could not convict the suspected 2001 spy.[23]

The U.S. Government has never paid Inslaw Inc. for any of these unauthorized uses of PROMIS.

"Inslaw deserves to be compensated," wrote nationally syndicated columnist, Michelle Malkin, in The Washington Times.[24] "More importantly, the American people deserve to know the truth: Did government greed and bureaucratic hubris lead to a wholesale sellout of our national security?"[22]

Deaths allegedly related to the Inslaw case

While investigating elements of this story, journalist Danny Casolaro died in what was twice ruled a suicide. Prior to his death, Casolaro had warned friends if they were ever told he had committed suicide not to believe it, and to know he had been murdered.[25] Many have argued that his death was curious, deserving closer scrutiny; some have argued further, believing his death was a murder, committed to hide whatever Casolaro had uncovered. "I believe he was murdered," wrote former Attorney General Elliot Richardson in the New York Times, " but even if that is no more than a possibility, it is a possibility with such sinister implications as to demand a serious effort to discover the truth."[10] Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith discuss this in their book, The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro[nb 11] Writing on behalf of a majority opinion in House Report 102-857, Committee Chairman, Jack Brooks (D-TX) wrote, "As long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation into the INSLAW matter, it is imperative that further investigation be conducted."[2]

References

Notes

  1. ^ Peter Videnieks was the Contract Officer who oversaw the PROMIS contract for the Department of Justice Management Division.
  2. ^ "At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)"—Wired, Richard Fricker[1]
  3. ^ Once a member of California Governor Ronald Reagan's Cabinet, Earl Brian in 1980-90s owned United Press International and Financial News Network. He was later convicted in 1996 on ten of thirteen counts for bank fraud, lying to auditors and conspiring to cover up financial problems at UPI and FNN. He was then sentenced to prison. During the Inslaw Affair, it was alleged that Earl Brian received PROMIS from Peter Videnieks. It was further alleged that Brian then contracted a shadowy character named Michael Riconosciuto to install a "back door" into the database in order to enhance U.S. intelligence operations around the globe.[4][5]
  4. ^ INSLAW Inc. v. United States, Ch 11. Case No. 85 00070, Adv. No. 86-00069, transcript of oral decision, p.9 (Bankruptcy. District of Columbia. September 28, 1987). ["took, converted and stole"]
  5. ^ INSLAW Inc, v. United States, 83 B.R., 89 (Bankruptcy. District of Columbia. 1988), p.158. ["trickery, fraud and deceit."]
  6. ^ INSLAW Inc. v. United States, opinion of U.S. District Court Judge William Bryant, at p. 52A. ["acted willfully and fraudulently"]
  7. ^ Out of 136 federal judges due for reappointment, Mr. Bason became one of four not reappointed.
  8. ^ The INSLAW Octopus, Wired magazine. 1993. See subsection "Who Fired Inslaw's Lawyer?" p. 8[[1]
  9. ^ The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals chose not to address the merits of the lower courts rulings.
  10. ^ The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has exclusive jurisdiction over copyright infringement claims against the U. S. Government.
  11. ^ The Octopus was the name that Casolaro had intended to title his book.

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f Fricker, Richard L. (1993). "The INSLAW Octopus". Wired magazine. pp. ppg.1-8. Retrieved 2008-08-28. Cite error: The named reference "Fricker" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b c d e Committe on the Judiciary (1992-09-10). "House Report 102-857:THE INSLAW AFFAIR, Investigative Report". Retrieved 2008-08-22.
  3. ^ a b c Hamilton, William A. (2006-11-17). "FBI's Incapacitating Cover-Up". Nachrichten von Heute. Retrieved 2008-08-28.
  4. ^ "Ex-UPI chairman's convictions upheld". Associated Press Archive. 1999-10-04. Retrieved 2008-09-14. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) (Search using Advanced Search, news article: title and date.)
  5. ^ Grabbe, J. Orlin (1996-10-21). "Earl Brian Convicted in California". webtext.files.com. Retrieved 2008-09-14.
  6. ^ May, Patrick (1985-02-16). "Computer Firm Hired By Courts Has Money Woes". Miami Herald. pp. 2BR. ($fee)
  7. ^ a b c "Inslaw's lawyer slams Justice investigation". The Washington Times. 1993-06-21. Retrieved 2008-09-11.
  8. ^ Richardson, Elliot (2001-07-24). "The Bua Rebuttal". Washington-weekly.com (a ZoomInfo cached page). Retrieved 2008-09-11. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  9. ^ Potts, Mark (1991-05-08). "Justice Department Wins Appeal in Inslaw Case". The Washington Post. pp. C8. Retrieved 2008-09-05. ($fee)
  10. ^ a b Richardson, Elliot L. (1991-10-21). "A High-Tech Watergate". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-05.
  11. ^ Pease, Linda. Inslaw/PROMIS "Real History Archives Inslaw/PROMIS collection". Retrieved 2008-09-10. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  12. ^ Opinion (1991-12-07). "Justice in the Inslaw Case". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-11.
  13. ^ Lane, Ambrose I. (1995). Return of the Buffalo: The Story Behind America's Indian Gaming Explosion. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 174. ISBN 0897894332. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  14. ^ Office of Public Affairs, press release #323 (1997-08-04). "Justice Department Successful Against Inslaw Claims in Federal Claims Court". U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved 2008-09-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ Katz-Stone, Adam (1997-09-17). "Judge says Justice Dept. didn't steal from Inslaw". Washington Business Journal. Retrieved 2008-09-11.
  16. ^ three-judge Review Panel (1998-05-11). "INSLAW v. THE UNITED STATES, No. 95-338X, 48 C.F.R. § 3.101-1" (PDF). Court of Federal Claims. Retrieved 2008-09-13.
  17. ^ Thomas, Gordon (1999). Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-25284-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  18. ^ "Software likely in hands of terrorist, FBI's Hanssen seen as provider". The Washington Times. 2001-06-14. Retrieved 2008-09-08. ($fee)
  19. ^ Ruppert, Michael C. (2001-11-16). "Bin Laden's Magic Carpet - Secret U.S. PROMIS Software". From The Wilderness (website). Retrieved 2008-08-28.
  20. ^ Cameron, Carl (2001-10-16). "Excerpt of Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume of October 16, 2001". Fox News. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
  21. ^ Smothers, Ronald (2006-05-05). "Former Marine Admits Passing Secret Documents". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-09-09.
  22. ^ a b c d Dastych, David (2006-01-31). "Promisgate: World's longest spy scandal still glossed over". Canada Free Press (CFP). Retrieved 2008-08-28.
  23. ^ Purdy, Matthew (2001-02-05). "Prosecution Unravels: The Case of Wo Ho Lee". New York Times. pp. ppg. 1-9. Retrieved 2008-09-12.
  24. ^ Washington Times Web Archive (Registration Required)
  25. ^ Lewis, Neil A. (1991-08-17). "Reporter Is Buried Amid Questions Over His Pursuit of Conspiracy Idea". New York Times. pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2008-08-27.

Further reading

  • The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith (Feral House, US, 2005, paperback ISBN 0-922915-91-1)
  • The Attorney General's refusal to provide congressional access to "privileged" INSLAW documents : hearing before the Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, second session, December 5, 1990. Washington : U.S. G.P.O. : For sale by the Supt. of Docs., Congressional Sales Office, U.S. G.P.O, 1990. Superintendent of Documents Number Y 4.J 89/1:101/114
  • PROMIS : briefing series. Washington, D.C. : Institute for Law and Social Research, 1974-1977. "[A] series of 21 Briefing Papers for PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System), this publication was prepared by the Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAW), Washington, D.C., under a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which has designated PROMIS as an Exemplary Project." OCLC Number 5882076

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inslaw&oldid=244559891"