The octopus returns

While googling around to answer a question that had been asked on a mailing list, I found this conspiracy story about 150,000 Israeli sleeper agents (sayanim) in the US, trained by former former Mossad ops director Rafi Eitan. They’re supposedly here to track al Qaeda terrorists and protect Jewish and Israeli interests here, since the US government is too incompetent to do the job. Towards the bottom of the page, I saw this:

In a separate but related incident, another former Mossad agent, Juval Aviv, has claimed in an email that Eitan is using the latest version of Promis-the sophisticated software that can track terrorists-to help to train sayanim.

“Promis”? That sounds familiar....

The software was originally stolen by Eitan from a specialist Washington computer company, Inslaw. Since then, Inslaw has developed several even more sophisticated versions of the program.

Yes, it’s the return of the Inslaw Octopus!

Inslaw (originally founded by the government) accused the Justice Department of having stolen a software package (originally created by the government, but Inslaw did further development) from them. PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) is a case-management software for federal prosecutors, that’s possibly been modified to track intelligence operations and assets. There are claims that a version has been sold to foreign governments, with backdoors that the US can use to spy on their intelligence agencies. Danny Casolaro, a journalist who was investigating the story and claimed it was a massive global conspiracy, was found dead in a motel bathtub with his wrists slashed, the death ruled a suicide.

This was a thriving conspiracy story in the early ’90s. Not TV network level, but Village Voice level. Two or three years ago, bugsybanana asked me whatever became of it. Now we know:

In his email, sent at 9:19 a.m. on Aug. 22 to Inslaw boss, Bill Hamilton, Aviv-who is president of the New York-based Interfor, an international private security agency staffed with former intelligence officers-makes an astonishing claim:

The new version of Promis was tested in Ohio by you-know-who, and he caused the blackout last weekend.

It was a test that was not meant to cause that much devastating damage, but because their infrastructure is so old and vulnerable, it went down without being able to correct itself. That is how we got the blackout in 2003.

How about that! A database tracking system that can knock out power plants! This must be the 21st-century version of the maxim that all software grows until it can send email.