A case-management program
PROMIS — the Prosecutor's Management Information System — was written by Inslaw, a small Washington company founded by a former National Security Agency analyst named William Hamilton. It did something unremarkable on its face: it tracked criminal cases. Who was charged, with what, where the paperwork had got to. In March 1982 the Justice Department signed a $9.9 million contract to install it across ninety-four United States Attorneys' offices.
The dispute was about a later, enhanced version. Inslaw said it had built that version with its own money and that the Department was not licensed to use it. The Department kept using it. In June 1986 Inslaw filed for bankruptcy and sued.
What makes this worth an entry is not the allegation. It is what happened to the allegation when courts and a congressional committee got hold of it.
What the courts and the committee found
Two federal courts found for Inslaw, and the language they used was not hedged. They found that the Department had "took, converted, stole" the enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit."
The House Committee on the Judiciary then spent three years on it. Its report, The INSLAW Affair, was published on 10 September 1992 as H. Rept. 102-857. The committee wrote that its investigation "largely supports the findings of two federal courts" on the taking of the software, and added that "this misappropriation involved officials at the highest levels of the Department of Justice."
The committee also said what it thought the obstacle was. It noted that the Attorney General had appointed a retired federal judge, Nicholas Bua, as special counsel in November 1991, and that it awaited his findings — but that "as long as the investigation of wrongdoing by former and current high level Justice officials remains under the ultimate control of the Department itself, there will always be serious doubt about the objectivity and thoroughness of the inquiry." It called for an independent counsel. It did not get one.
What the Department said back
Bua's team of six lawyers produced a 267-page report in March 1993. The Department then published its own 187-page review of that report on 27 September 1994, under Attorney General Janet Reno.
Its conclusion was flat: "there is no credible evidence that employees of the Department of Justice conspired with anyone to steal PROMIS." It found no basis for further payment to Inslaw. It also assessed the people the allegations rested on and found them unreliable — Michael Riconosciuto, who was by then serving a thirty-year sentence on methamphetamine charges, and Ari Ben-Menashe, whom congressional investigators had already declined to credit.
So the record contains, on paper, two federal courts and a congressional committee finding a theft, and the accused department finding no theft. That is the actual state of the documentary record, and it is why this sits in a different category from most claims about government wrongdoing: the dispute is not between a theory and the government, it is between parts of the government.
Where the wider claim starts
The larger story attached to PROMIS is that the software did not stay in prosecutors' offices. In the version that circulated from the late 1980s, a modified PROMIS carrying a hidden back door was sold or given to foreign intelligence services and banks, so that whoever installed it was handing its authors a window into their own files. Around that grew a set of connections to the October Surprise allegations, to the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and to Iran-Contra.
That part is not what the courts found. The courts addressed a contract and a piece of software taken without payment. No court or committee finding establishes the back door, the foreign sales, or the links to those other affairs, and the Department's review named the sources for them and rejected them. The distance between the two halves of this story is the single most important thing about it, and it is routinely collapsed in the retellings.
Danny Casolaro
Danny Casolaro was a freelance writer, born in 1947, who had owned a computer-trade magazine and came to Inslaw through that world. He called what he thought he was looking at the Octopus: in his description, a sprawling collaboration that ran through Inslaw, the October Surprise, BCCI and Iran-Contra, with the same small group of people recurring at each.
On 10 August 1991 he was found dead at noon in room 517 of a Sheraton in Martinsburg, West Virginia, naked in the bath, with deep cuts to both wrists — three or four on the right, seven or eight on the left. He had told his family he was going to Martinsburg to meet a source. The medical examiner ruled suicide by exsanguination. A handwritten note was found: "To those who I love the most: Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done."
His family disputed the finding. They said he had been getting threatening calls at night, that he had told relatives something might happen to him in Martinsburg, and that he was squeamish about blood to a degree that made the method implausible. The handling of the scene has been criticised on specific grounds — the body was embalmed before the family was notified, the bathwater was not retained.
The finding has been examined more than once. A second autopsy in January 1992 reaffirmed suicide. An FBI task force in December 1992 questioned the suicide conclusion and recommended further investigation. The Department's 1994 review returned to it and said: "There is no credible evidence that Mr. Casolaro was murdered," citing the autopsy findings, blood-spatter analysis, and accounts of his financial and professional difficulties.
What is available to check
Unusually for a story of this kind, much of it is in public repositories. H. Rept. 102-857 is a published congressional document. The Department's 1994 review was issued as a press release and is still on the Department's own archive. The National Archives holds the Department's Inslaw files in Record Group 60, in several series processed under titles including "Records Relating to Inslaw, 1991-1994," covering the investigations, Casolaro's theories and his death — some of it subject to privacy and law-enforcement screening before release.
A reader who wants to work out what they think about this does not have to take anyone's summary of it, which is not true of most of the things the Octopus was said to connect.