The Government Essentially STOLE This Company’s Software in the 1980’s

Transcript

Before Edward Snowden came out and spilled the beans on the NSA back in the day, they were doing all kinds of crazy s**t. Now, the Hamiltons were the founders of a software company named INSLAW. INSLAW developed a program called PROMIS, which stands for Prosecutors Management Information System, designed for law enforcement to use in case management and record keeping. Now, PROMIS at this time was very revolutionary. It would allow data to be shared among different agencies way easier than it could be shared before.

So the U.S. government was very interested in this PROMIS software. They wanted to use it not just in prosecutors offices, but in all sorts of different government and law enforcement agencies. So in 1982, they inked a $9.2 million deal with INSLAW and PROMIS would then be installed in 20 U.S. attorney offices and 70 more if the first 20 went well.

Two years into their three year contract with INSLAW, The U.S. Department of Justice started withholding millions of dollars in payments to the Hamilton's company, which these lack of payments ended up forcing them into bankruptcy. This was all a plan. The Department of Justice was intensely playing a cat and mouse game with INSLAW, trying to send it into bankruptcy so they could buy the company and do whatever they want with this software. And then on top of that, it was illegally selling the software to different U.S.

agencies like the CIA and NSA. It's honestly unbelievable what the American public didn't know in the 1980s.