Rules

PROMIS

PROH-mis
The Prosecutor's Management Information System, case-tracking software whose alleged theft by the Justice Department became the Inslaw affair, and the alleged backdoor that became the Octopus.
Documented

The court record

Inslaw, founded by William Hamilton, built PROMIS for US attorneys' offices. The company accused the Justice Department of withholding payments to drive it into bankruptcy and seize the software. In 1987 and 1988, a bankruptcy judge and then a district court ruled the Department had taken PROMIS by trickery, fraud, and deceit. An appeals court reversed on jurisdictional grounds, not innocence. The 1992 House Judiciary report found serious concerns and listed subpoenaed documents the Department reported missing. No one was ever held accountable.

Assessment: The two court rulings, the reversal, and the House report are all public record.
Stories

The backdoor and the bathtub

Michael Riconosciuto swore in a March 1991 affidavit that he had modified PROMIS at the Cabazon reservation to carry a surveillance backdoor, sold onward by Reagan insider Earl Brian, and that Israeli intelligence distributed a bugged version worldwide, Robert Maxwell as salesman. Eight days after the affidavit, Riconosciuto was arrested on drug charges and drew 30 years. Journalist Danny Casolaro, weaving Inslaw into a grand theory he called the Octopus, was found dead in a Martinsburg bathtub in August 1991, wrists slashed, officially suicide, his brother's warning, if anything happens to me, don't believe it, outliving every report.

Assessment: The affidavit, the arrest timing, and the death are documented. The backdoor's reality remains officially unproven, the Bua report called Riconosciuto's account a historical novel.
Interesting claims

The software as founding myth

The claim: PROMIS matters less as a program than as proof of concept for privatized surveillance, the template Webb traces to Palantir: government capability, cutout ownership, foreign sales, deniable backdoors, and a whistleblower punished by prosecution rather than refutation. Verdict: the structural rhyme with later documented programs is real, and the pattern of investigating investigators is a matter of record. But the strongest claims rest on one affiant of contested reliability. The Octopus may be the truest theory ever built on a single shaky witness, which is exactly why it can neither be killed nor confirmed.

Assessment: undefined
Sources and further reading
  1. US House Judiciary Committee, The Inslaw Affair (1992)
  2. Bua Report (1993); DOJ review (1994)
  3. Wired, The INSLAW Octopus (1993)
  4. Riconosciuto affidavit (March 21, 1991); Netflix, American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (2024)
Worth asking

If five federal investigations found nothing, why does the case refuse to close?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+