BEER -- chapters 10 and 23 (possible spoilers) -- PROMIS 1.1

[Thomas Eckhardt]

"'I see my share of conspiracy theories, some are patently bullshit, 
some I want to believe so much I have to be careful, others are 
inescapable even if I wanted to escape.'"

March Kelleher, BE 117

--Sound like a conspiracy theorist's dream? Absolutely. But the fact is, 
it's true.--

Richard L. Fricker, "The INSLAW Octopus"


In this and the following postings I will dig a little deeper into the 
PROMIS matter (but not to worry: Eichmann, spy satellites, the NSA and 
octopuses will also turn up). I have tried to be as focused as possible 
but PROMIS is a difficult beast to handle. In the first round of 
postings, I will examine the passages in BE where PROMIS is explicitly 
mentioned and provide some historical context and background.


We find the first veiled reference to PROMIS in BE on page 99. Ernie 
claims that his son-in-law Avi's line of work includes developing 
"Software to kill Arabs." (BE 99)

It will become clear later what this is about.


PROMIS is explicitly mentioned for the first time when Nicholas Windust 
meets Maxine:

"Maxine: 'So. This was about my brother-in-law. He'll be back in a 
couple of weeks, you can can talk to him yourself.'
Windust: 'You want to know what's been getting the security community 
all nervous lately, Ms. Tarnow? It’s a piece of software called Promis, 
originally designed for federal prosecutors, to share data among the 
district courts.'" (BE 104)

The software's name is mostly given as "PROMIS" but one can also find 
"Promis."


*What is PROMIS?*

PROMIS is short for Prosecutor's Management Information System, a 
software developed in the mid-70s by the Washington D.C.
based information technology company Inslaw.

--Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors,
PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of
PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said
Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by
case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer,
and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all
the cases."

What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete
rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been
involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has
represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a
lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which
stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea
bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can
help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a
particular type of case.--

Richard L. Fricker, "The INSLAW Octopus"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw_pr.html
(March/April 1993)

Windust continues,

"It works regardless of what language your files are written in, even 
what operating system you’re using." (BE 104)

Compare:

--Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) 
programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington,
D.C.'s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information 
System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer
programming. Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or 
smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today's PCs,
PROMIS, from its first "test drive" a quarter century ago, was able to 
do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do.
It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different 
computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless
of the language in which the original programs had been written or the 
operating system or platforms on which that data base was then
currently installed.--

Michael C. Ruppert, "Promis"
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/052401_promis.html
(September 2000)

The wording suggests that Ruppert is probably one of Pynchon’s sources. 
I will later demonstrate that this is indeed the case.

The information from the two articles by Ruppert that I will reference 
is also available in Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon," perhaps even
verbatim. As I do not have that book I will quote from Ruppert's articles.

Thomas

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l