Juvenescence for the Brain

I recently came across talk of PROMIS software in some of my readings on the CIA and military black ops. Being unfamiliar with it, I decided to do some research.

This story has several interesting components. First and foremost, the software itself has stunning capabilities that go far beyond its “stated purpose”. There’s also the extremely shady way in which the government handled the software. And, of course, this wouldn’t be a juicy conspiracy story unless there were allegations of corruption and misappropriation, to boot!

The software’s creator, Inslaw, was founded in the mid 1970’s by a former NSA/CIA agent. From the very beginning, almost all funding for Inslaw came directly from the government. If you visit their website, it seems pretty obvious that Inslaw isn’t terribly concerned about winning over new business – in other words, they’re hardly a “business” at all. Their purpose was to create “a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts.” This mission yielded the first versions of Promis, delivered to the government that same decade (1970’s).

Promis can take information from any number of databases and integrate it together in a meaningful way. It can parse any data system (regardless of how old or defunct), essentially turning any kind of raw information from any source into useable material.

The implications are endless, and extremely unnerving.

From a WIRED article on the software: “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.”

As you might imagine, other uses for Promis were soon discovered.

Imagine you’re the U.S. government, and have access to telephone and bank records for people. Promis makes child’s play out of running highly specific, goal-oriented searches. You want to know when and where I’ve ever purchased a book? Done. You want to know how many cumulative minutes I’ve ever spent on the phone with Bank of America? Done. You want to keep tabs on the horribly disorganized airline databases to notify you if I buy a plane ticket to Pakistan? Done.

The implications are endless, and extremely unnerving.

From this article… “Through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased. Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren’t those “club” cards from your supermarket handy?”

You know in Enemy of the State, when Will Smith is being followed by the government? Turns out that kind of stuff is not as fictional as we might hope. As long as the user has access to information (as our government had and continues to have), they have complete control. Make no mistake about it, knowledge is power.

Our government most certainly uses Promis to integrate data about world politics. Everything from the economic situation in China to ongoing investigations at Interpol – it’s all fair game. That means that we probably have better means for parsing criminal records of people in Japan than even the Japanese themselves.

Here’s where it gets even stickier.

Among the secrets that convicted FBI double-agent, Robert Hanssen, allegedly furnished to the KGB was our government’s working version of Promis. Yes, the infinitely scary program that our government uses to keep tabs on both its own citizens as well as foreign governments, had fallen into the hands of the Russians. Adding insult to injury, the Russians sold that software to many other third-parties, including Al-Qaeda.

Yes, many of our greatest enemies in the world now have, in their possession, one of our greatest strategic assets.

Some have speculated that Bin Laden’s possession of Promis is one of the reasons we’ve never caught the damn guy. If he’s aware of how much we know, it’s much easier to stay under the radar. We think that Bin Laden still has access to most of his money, even amidst an international effort to freeze them, and Promis is probably making this possible for him.

There’s one huge caveat. The user must have access (obviously) to huge stores of contemporary information in order for Promis to be effective. We don’t know how capable groups like Al-Qaeda are at obtaining this type of raw material – which essentially must be hacked from various government/private databases. The danger that Promis poses, in unsavory hands, is entirely dependent on their ability to hack.

What do you think about all of this?