The Deep, Meaningless Rabbithole of the Inslaw/PROMIS Affair

In 2024, Netflix released the four part docuseries American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders about the mysterious 1991 death of journalist Danny Casolaro and his investigation into the Inslaw/PROMIS affair—a spiraling conspiracy theory that connected every major scandal of the 1980s to a federal software contract dispute.

Even before the Netflix series, the Inslaw/PROMIS affair had been a subject of much theorizing, including books, articles, an off-broadway stage play, and an episode of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

The short version is that PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) was the name of software written in COBOL created by the software company Inslaw in the 1980s for federal prosecutors to keep track of cases winding through the legal system. Eventually, Inslaw fell into bankruptcy, leading to a protracted legal battle between Inslaw and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

During the bankruptcy dispute, Inslaw would accuse the DOJ of an extensive conspiracy that connected the software to everything under the sun—the Iran-Contra scandal, BCCI scandal, the October surprise, drug cartels, Israeli intelligence, etc—which is why it was dubbed “the Octopus.”

One version described the U.S. government of providing a copy of the software to Israel, who then augmented it with spyware and backdoor access and then sold it to intelligence firms across the world.

While there was plenty of speculation about what Casolaro could have unearthed during his investigation via a source connected to Lyndon Larouche, the Inslaw/PROMIS affair might be one of the most researched subjects in U.S. government history with at least five separate federal investigations—including ones from the DOJ, CIA, House Judiciary Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSC)—all of it leading to dead ends. Much of the investigations asked seemingly insignificant questions about whether government agencies used the software or shared it with others.

Compare that to the investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which originally got little attention or scrutiny but would eventually be described by a Senate investigation as an “international financial crime on a massive and global scale.”

Democrats in Congress at the time successfully demanded an independent counsel be appointed to investigate the affair, even though similar attempts at investigating illegal military funding to Iraq around the same time went nowhere.

The DOJ investigation ordered by then-attorney general William Barr would entail interviewing dozens of people related to Inslaw and the DOJ team handling the contract. None of them corroborated Inslaw’s accusations that an employee of the DOJ intentionally targeted the company and aimed to bring them down, steal their software, or add in spyware.

According to the Bua report—named after the DOJ counsel investigating it—Inslaw’s finances fell apart as the grants that originally funded PROMIS via the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)—a subagency of the DOJ—ended.

Inslaw was originally created as a nonprofit only to later switch to for-profit status, similar to the transformation done by the OpenAI Foundation. As it was funded by government grants, PROMIS was actually in the public domain, and Inslaw had no exclusive rights to it.

Prior to losing its funding, Inslaw received what were called “advanced payments,” wherein they were paid even before their invoices were processed—a unique situation for most contractors. Without government grants, advanced payments, or a unique claim to PROMIS’ intellectual property, Inslaw was unable to privately fund additional work.

Another story of the time detailed how Inslaw was way over their heads for other software projects: unable to complete contracts and far over budget.

In Inslaw’s eyes, the DOJ stole PROMIS and wanted to give it to one of their employees as a gift for their work as part of the Iran-Contra affair. But the DOJ employee, who was also an ex-Inslaw employee harboring a longstanding grudge, had little to do with the project and no known connections to the Iran-Contra affair. More often, government workers are accused of having a positive connection with contracting firms that enable them to receive government contracts.

A large source of the accusations that the government added spyware to PROMIS came from Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer that admitted to hacking PROMIS. Riconosciuto would be arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for methamphetamine production shortly after his accusations.

Few of Riconosciuto’s accusations could be verified. The location where he professed to have edited the software was a largely empty native American reservation with no sign of a computer lab or computers in general.

The investigation did confirm one of Riconosciuto’s accusations: that the reservation was the site of a company working with the defense contractor Wackenhut to bid on the development of night vision goggles for the military. While the project to bid on night vision goggles existed, there was no evidence of a lab to develop night vision goggles on the reservation either.

Potentially the reservation was simply used for its status as a reservation as Alaskan or native companies benefit from 8(a) minority and small business preference in government contracting, like that of Wackenhut’s work with the Alaskan company Alutiiq.

An Israeli-Canadian businessman who previously worked for Israeli intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, gave testimony detailing how PROMIS was being sold to governments across the globe, but when interviewed under the Bua investigation he detailed how it was a different version of PROMIS developed by the NSA for signals intelligence, which Israel added backdoors to allowing it access to the systems of banks around the world. In total, the investigation found no basis for his testimony:

After a thorough investigation, the Task Force described Ben-Menashe’s testimony variously as totally lacking in credibility,” “fabricated,” “demonstrably false from beginning to end, “riddled with inconsistencies and factual misstatements,” and “a total fabrication.”

Eventually it was revealed that the DOJ gave a copy of Inslaw’s PROMIS to Dr. Ben Orr, a senior assistant state attorney with the Israeli Justice Ministry who was on an exchange program at the DOJ. When interviewed, Orr detailed that the justice ministry never installed the software as it was foreign-produced and instead contracted with an Israeli company to produce their own version called 2000.

Multiple PROMISs

Much of the confusion surrounding PROMIS was that there were multiple software packages called PROMIS made by different companies. Besides the one developed by Inslaw, another one, Project Management Information System, used by the CIA was developed by Strategic Software Planning Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Accusations that the Canadian government was using PROMIS were based on confusion with the Strategic Software Planning Corporation’s software of the same name.

Then there was another software package used by the NSA called Product Related On-line Management Information System for signals intelligence.

Another package unrelated to government work, the Problem-Oriented Medical Information System, also existed at the time.

Origin of Wild-Eyed Claims

While little evidence pointed to a grand conspiracy surrounding the software, there was some legitimate reason that it might be investigated. The original court filing on behalf of Inslaw accusing the DOJ of a grandiose scheme was made by Elliot Richardson—a prominent D.C. attorney who would go on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.

Despite little evidence that the DOJ was trying to sabotage their business, one bankruptcy judge did side with Inslaw, finding that the DOJ intentionally harmed their business. That finding was eventually thrown out on appeal.

Many of the accusations seemed like they were plausible and might have parallels in other cases: compromised software and sensitive data, corporate sabotage and abuse of the DOJ.

But many of the original accusations made no sense. They involved coordinated illegal activity by the federal government—”trickery, fraud, and deceit” in the original affidavit—solely to obtain basic case management software and avoid payment on a relatively minor contract.

The accusations that the government would augment software with spyware and sell it to drug cartels implied that drug cartels would want or need legal case management software.

While Inslaw accused the DOJ of trying to steal their software, Inslaw actively avoided providing the government with a copy of the software they paid for, and instead encouraged them to use a newer, shared version of the software from a remote computer—something unique at the time in the mid 1980s.

All software has the ability to be compromised with spyware and backdoors, but the original version of PROMIS would have little ability to be hacked in a time when most computers had no connection to the internet or even other computers, whereas the newer, remote version that Inslaw wanted DOJ to use would not reside on government property and likely have more security concerns.