Talk:PROMIS (software)

A very problematic article

This article began as almost pure conspiracy theory material. Although the most low grade sources have been removed, sourcing is still unacceptably poor. The article also ignores the extensive history of the entire Promis controversy, citing the flawed House Judiciary Committee report, omitting the three other government reports (described in the Inslaw article), and ignoring the Court of Federal Claims hearing and report which settled the Inslaw legal case.

Instead, it cites an NYT article (published the month before the CFC settled the case) which touts the 1997 Calvi and Pfister book, a recycled version of the 1992 Ari Ben-Menashe book. Neither of these books is reliable; Ben-Menashe is not reliable, Calvi/Pfister are not reliable.

Incredibly, NYT even cites an "article" from the Summer 1996 issue of "Conspiracy Nation", a text file zine published on USENET. This is not reliable, not acceptable!

I will come back to this article soon. Rgr09 (talk) 12:54, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

The article currently states:

In the early 1980s, Manucher Ghorbanifar and Adnan Khashoggi both had facilitated the transaction of PROMIS software to Khalid bin Mahfouz, a prominent Saudi billionaire.

Per WP:REDFLAG, we need "multiple high-quality sources" for exceptional claims and neither of the sources are high quality. For example, Ryan Gallagher's 2011 article in The New Statesman calls Richard Babayan a "former arms broker and CIA 'contract operative', however, the House October Surprise Task Force found that he had an extensive criminal records and earlier allegations he made about the October Surprise conspiracy theory were not credible. Jack Colhoun's 2021 article in CovertAction Magazine states CAM had "obtained new evidence in the PROMIS software affair". Colhoun does not state how they got this "new evidence", but it is clear that Colhou and CAM are at least eleven years late to the party.

If Cheri Seymour's The Last Circle (Trine Day, 2010) is to be believed, this material has its origins in a May 1985 letter from William Bradford Reynolds to Bill Weld that Bill Hamilton said he received from an unnamed "U.S. intelligence source" in November 2004 (see page 363). The letter states, in part: "As agreed Messrs. Manichur Ghorbanifar, Adnan Khashoggi, and Richard Armitage will broker the transaction of Promise software to Sheik Klahid bin Mahfouz for resale and general distribution as gifts in his region contingent upon the three conditions we last spoke of". Seymour said that Hamilton said Reynolds said it was drafted by D. Lowell Jensen. Nevermind that Seymour has cited our Wikipedia page on Adnan Khashoggi as a source, there are so many red flags here. Who was the unnamed intelligence source and why did they wait twenty years to pass it along? Did Jensen/Weld/Reynolds have direct contact with Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi, or were there intermediaries? Why would they have reached out to Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi to talk to a Saudi businessman? (The Iran-Contra people only used Ghoranifar because he was already a channel to Iranian officials.) The CIA issued a burn notice on Ghorbanifar in July 1984, but the Octopus conspirators were so careless that decided to work with a known fabricator anyway? Why would Jensen/Reynolds put something so sensitive like this in a letter, and why would they need written confirmation to something that had been agreed upon? I suspect that whomever created this letter was bootstrapping on public information (and other known conspiracy theories) about or involving Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi.

TLDR: I removing this material as it fails multiple clauses of WP:REDFLAG. -Location (talk) 15:20, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Agree with redflag and removal. Trine Day publications are not acceptable sourcing for Wikipedia articles. Ditto Covert Action Magazine (CAM).

A good point on the strange appearance of Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar in the letter. And it is also worth noting that the Americans named in the letter are even more bizarre. Why is Reynolds, the Civil Rights Division AAG, writing to Weld, the Boston USA, about distributing PROMIS in the Middle East? What earthly reason could there be for this?

But wait, Seymour's book says that Bill Hamilton said that Donald Carr said that Bradford Reynolds said that he actually remembered this letter and signed it on behalf of Lowell Jensen. It was brought to him by Jensen's secretary because it needed to be signed by a member of Ed Meese's "inner circle."

This is absurd on the face of it. The letter, apparently signed by Reynolds, refers to "the three conditions we last spoke of." It ends by saying "If you encounter any problems contact me directly." This "I", however, refers not to the signer Reynolds, whose name, by the way, is even typed on the letter, but to Jensen?

And Weld's reason for receiving this weird missive? What was he supposed to do after he got it? Check and make sure PROMIS is equipped with the "special data retrieval unit"? Wasn't PROMIS supposed to be a COBOL program written for VAX computers? Hm, maybe it needed to be hooked up to a CRM 114.

All of these question have a really simple answer of course. The Reynolds-Weld letter could not possibly be authentic.

Rgr09 (talk) 03:35, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

References

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Shouldn't it be mentioned in this article that secrets were stolen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory using PROMIS software? 204.11.186.190 (talk) 18:22, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

No, it should not be mentioned unless there is a reliable source for it. Rgr09 (talk) 22:51, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. -Location (talk) 23:38, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

The nature of PROMIS

The article suffers from a basic problem. PROMIS was, and is, legal case management software. Why would intelligence agencies wish to buy such a thing? It offers no intelligence related functions at all. This is stated in the Dwyer Review of Judge Bua's Report, and was confirmed by the Court of Federal Claims which provided copies of the PROMIS code to a number of outside experts for review. All of this is referenced in the Inslaw article.

The description of the software in this article, however, follows the claims of Ari Ben-Menashe in his book Profits of War. As Dwyer (fn, p. 40) remarks, "his description of the power of the PROMIS program as "Big Brother-like" and a "monster" does not comport with reality. ... PROMIS is a case tracking software program used to index relevant information on pending cases. The suggestion that it could be used to "'keep track of everyone'" is patently absurd." This should be in the article. Rgr09 (talk) 23:03, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

The sources for the Reynolds-to-Weld letter are claiming that it proves some sort of "back door" capability for the purposes of espionage. -Location (talk) 23:33, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

The issue is not the back door. The issue is what can the PROMIS software itself do? I should have included the Ben-Menashe quote. He wrote:

Using a modem, the spy network would then tap into the computers of such services as the telephone company, the water board, other utility commissions, credit card companies, etc. PROMIS would then search for specific information. For example, if a person suddenly started using more water and more electricity and making more phone calls than usual, it might be suspected he had guests staying with him. PROMIS would then start searching for the records of his friends and associates, and if it was found that one had stopped using electricity and water, it might be assumed, based on other records stored in PROMIS, that the missing person was staying with the subject of the investigation. This would be enough to have him watched if, for example, he had been involved in previous conspiracies." (Profits of War, 131-132.)

PROMIS was case-management software and part of the lawsuit was Inslaw's claim that US agencies like the FBI and IRS copied PROMIS for use in their own case management. This was one of the issues contested in the Court of Federal Claims, which hired several outside experts to examine the PROMIS code, UI, etc to see if it was indeed being used by these agencies in their in-house software.

The answer was no, it was not. That result was stated in the court's decision, but I don't know the exact details of the the experts' report. However, based on the decision, and Dwyer's review of Bua's report, one thing that is clear is that the PROMIS software as examined by the outside experts did NOT do was covertly tap into computers belonging to other companies, defeating all security measures on them, and somehow run searches using some advanced algorithm to isolate arbitrary ranges of data.

Ben Menashe's example is obviously a wild fantasy that is indeed patently absurd. Case management software does not, cannot do such things. There were various packages that came with PROMIS, described in the lawsuit, all of which were oriented toward legal case management, compiling statistics on case status, time spent, personnel assigned, etc. Typical office software, none of this other science fiction like stuff, which would have involve a totally different design.

Note also that this program was originally written in COBOL and ran on computer systems that have now been obsolete for over 30 years. The enhanced version of PROMIS contested in the lawsuit was written for a VAX machine.

There was no earthly reason for any intelligence agency to use such software, and even if it did, and the software had a backdoor built in that enabled US intelligence agencies to covertly obtain all this information, it would not be of intelligence value to the US. Rgr09 (talk) 04:54, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Merger discussion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

To merge PROMIS (software) to Inslaw on grounds of overlap; much of the current content at PROMIS (software) relates to the broader topic. Klbrain (talk) 09:44, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

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The first paragraph of this article contains three entire sentences that are directly about the PROMIS software developed by Inslaw. The other three paragraphs are about the contract dispute and conspiracy allegations which are known as the Inslaw affair. There is very little to be known about company or the software that isn't actually about the Inslaw affair, so one option is to put it all in the same place. Inslaw affair currently redirects to Inslaw, so my ivote is to do the same with PROMIS (software). Another option is to merge only the three paragraphs that are not actually about the software, and replace them with a brief summary of the Inslaw affair using better sources. Thoughts? -Location (talk) 07:13, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

My vote is usually for merger in cases such as this. I don't see the point of spawning new articles from old ones using blurred or fuzzy distinctions.

In this case, the Inslaw article combined both a brief description of the company and its history, and the legal controversy over the DOJ contract. These can certainly be distinguished, if necessary, under Inslaw (company) and Inslaw affair.

The original version of the PROMIS (software) article focused on conspiratorial claims. It was later rewritten in an attempt to remove the weakest, most un-Wikipedian conspiracist claims and citations while preserving some of the ideas behind them.

I don't think the rewrite was successful. The PROMIS software is real, but it is not super spyware. Any attempt to portray it as such must founder on the shoals of reality. Put the simple, accurate description of the software back into Inslaw article. Put the non-existent superspyware into a an article describing the conspiracy theories, call it the octopus or whatever. Done. Rgr09 (talk) 15:26, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

When you state that the original version of this article was re-written, I'm not sure what you mean. I just started editing this article a few days ago and was soliciting feedback as to what should be done about the rest of the article (i.e. move/redirect the entire article, or remove/re-write the last three paragraphs). I'm in favor of what you are suggesting. -Location (talk) 15:51, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Maxwell and PROMIS

The article originally stated that "The media mogul and alleged Israeli spy Robert Maxwell was involved in selling the PROMIS software." This was sourced to an NYT article, but the article itself did not actually make this claim. Rather, it cited the Calvi Pfister book as making this claim. In fact, this claim comes direct from Ari Ben-Menashe, who not only made the claim in his own book, but was also a primary source for Calvi Pfister. This can be discussed under the Maxwell article, the Ben Menashe article, or in a number of other places, but does not below in the PROMIS article, no matter what the outcome of the merger proposal. Deleted. Rgr09 (talk) 01:21, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. I have seen this many, many times where a source states "so-and-so claims someone did something" and an editor comes along and writes "someone did something". There is a big difference. -Location (talk) 15:55, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Why is this article in the "Robert Maxwell" category, yet Robert Maxwell is mentioned nowhere in the text of the current version of this article? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 19:15, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

 Fixed -Location (talk) 20:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

MainCore

Shouldn't the FEMA MainCore database be mentioned in this article, if only briefly? 173.88.246.138 (talk) 04:01, 15 May 2023 (UTC)