ARAŞTIRMA DOSYALARI

PRISM’s Controversial Forerunner

By Richard
L. Fricker

Long
before Edward Snowden’s claims or revelations that the National Security
Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency were monitoring and tracking the
Internet, cell phones, e-mails and any other electronic communication they
could get their hands on using a program known as PRISM, there existed PROMIS
[Prosecutors Management Information Systems].

PROMIS was
designed in the late 1970s and ‘80s to bring Department of Justice criminal
case management from the dark ages into the light of the computer age. In the
spring of 1981, the Reagan Administration hailed PROMIS as one of law
enforcements greatest assets. By 1983, PROMIS had morphed into the behemoth
of intelligence gathering. It was not state of the art – it was the art.

Over the
ensuing decades PROMIS is reported to have been used by the DOJ, CIA, NSA,
and several foreign intelligence agencies including Israel’s Mossad. The
ownership of PROMIS has been the subject of federal court hearings and a
congressional investigation.

The
capabilities of PROMIS as a data collection and tracking program have never
been a secret. But the only discussion of PROMIS has been about theft and
black-market sales. Neither the courts nor Congress have ever inquired as to
privacy issues or the ethics of the program. There has been no rending of
political robes as seen with the Snowden case. In fact, the function of
PROMIS has been discussed in open court and various public arenas.

PROMIS is
a tracking program with enhancements by Washington, DC-based Inslaw Inc.,
owned by Bill and Nancy Hamilton. PROMIS was developed under a Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration [LEAA] grant. Bill Hamilton was
employed by NSA for six years. He left the agency in 1966.

PROMIS was
designed to track the vast amount of criminal cases piling up in DOJ offices
across the country. Bill Hamilton, in an interview for this story, recounted,
“It was always a tracking program. It was designed to keep track of cases in
local U.S. Attorneys’ offices, which means street crimes, keep track of the
scheduled events in court, what actually takes place, who’s there, witnesses,
police officers, conclusions, convictions, acquittals, whatever.”

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