User:Kent Heiner/PROMIS

The Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) is a database system developed by Inslaw, Inc, a Washington, D.C.-based information technology company.

Inslaw developed the earliest versions of PROMIS during the 1970s under contracts and grants from the United States Department of Justice. These guarantees gave the government licenses to use the early versions of PROMIS but not to modify them, or to create derivative works, or to distribute them outside the federal government.

Origins
PROMIS was a database program designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. It was funded almost entirely by the federal government; and therefore versions created prior to January 1978 were in the public domain. In 1981, after Congress liquidated the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) (which had been the primary source of funds for development of PROMIS), the developing 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, a 32-bit VAX 11/780 version (as opposed to the 16-bit PR1ME original in the public domain). A decades-long controversy ensued over the government's use of "Enhanced PROMIS", referred to hereafter simply as PROMIS.

Antecedents
CJIS

Electronic eavesdropping feature
"...Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."

What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.

But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases."

- Richard L. Fricker, Wired magazine, 1993, "The INSLAW Octopus".

More from the same article -- "PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system.

Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.

Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases"

- Fricker, Wired

A different author --

"Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today's PCs, PROMIS, from its first "test drive" a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that data base was then currently installed."

- Michael Ruppert, FTW.