How Ronald Reagan's minions referred to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Octafish]

7. Good luck with that one. The guy was investigated from October Surprise to Wedtech.

His role in the Inslaw/PROMIS affair bears special attention:

The INSLAW Octopus

Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice


By Richard L. Fricker
Wired

Bill Hamilton, Inslaw & PROMIS

Who:
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems).

Why #1:
The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s.

Why #2:
Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

SNIP...

What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian's 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word "misappropriated&quot . And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese.

A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising "serious concerns" that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee's call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently "lost" by the Department of Justice.

But so far, not a single person has been held accountable.

WIRED has spent two years searching for the answers to the questions Inslaw poses: Why would Justice steal PROMIS? Did it then cover up the theft? Did it let associates of government officials sell PROMIS to foreign governments, which then used the software to track political dissidents instead of legal cases? (Israel has reportedly used PROMIS to track troublesome Palestinians.)

The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese's business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw_pr.html

This software became the backbone of all sorts of stuff. Writing about it has gotten several people killed, like Danny Casolaro.

Must be some sort of misunderstanding of history or something... I, too, keep hearing he's all right... Ja... Famous people make enemies, ya know... Ah, the jealous minority groups... Oh. Those hippies... Yadda yadda... blah blah blah.