The CIA Had His Software Before He Even Signed the Contract

Transcript

Washington DC 1982. The Cold War is at full force. Intelligence agencies of both superpowers are spending billions of dollars to see everything and to remain invisible themselves. And at that very moment, in a small office not far from Capitol Hill, one man had already built something that both sides would wanted. His name was William Hamilton.

He was not a spy. He was a programmer, a former analyst from a national security agency who had decided to leave government service and build his own company. His software was called Promise, Prosecutor's Management Information System. On paper, a bureaucratic tool, a system for tracking court cases. In practice, something fundamentally different.

And it is precisely for that reason that the United States Department of Justice by court order committed against him an act of fraud, dishonesty, and violation of the law. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a federal court record. To understand what happened, we need to go back to the early 1970s. The American judicial system is drowning in paper.

Thousands of cases, hundreds of thousands of pages. Federal prosecutors managing everything by hand. The Department of Justice does not know precisely how many cases are currently in production. That is a literal fact. The government machinery of the most powerful country in the world, blind to itself from the inside.

William Hamilton sees this. Behind him, service at the National Security Agency. In 1973, he found in law incorporated and builds Promise. According to official documentation published by the Department of Justice in the Federal Register in 1989, Promise tracks court cases from three independent vantage points simultaneously, the crime, the accused, and the court proceedings. It links fingerprint-based identification numbers to criminal histories, connects defendants across multiple cases, and tracks every hearing, every outcome, every judge, every attorney.

Approximately 80% of the data enter itself automatically as the byproduct of standard case documentation. This is 1982. The internet does not exist and promis can already do what we today would call a rudimentary artificial intelligence. The department of justice signs a contract with INS law for approximately $10 million. But from the very first payment, something goes wrong.

The government begins withholding payments. Systematically, Innsaw stops receiving the money the contract requires. And then Hamilton discovers something else. The software is already running in prosecutor's offices across the country without his authorization, without additional compensation, distributed as though were government property in law files of bankruptcy. In 1985, not because the company failed, because the government stopped paying its bills.

In 1987, Judge George Basin issues his ruling. The United States Department justice had committed against in law an intentional act of fraud, dishonesty, and violation of the law deliberately, willfully. It appeared to be the end of the story. It was only the beginning. According to investigations conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s, a version of Promise was transferred to third parties, no longer from managing court cases.

What follows is theory based on testimony not proven in criminal court. A number of sources, including former intelligence officers, alleged that a back door was installed inside a modified version of Promise, a hidden channel allowing outside access to any database the software ran on without the knowledge of users and that this version was sold to foreign governments, Canada, Jordan, Israel, other countries. The logic if a country installed promise to run its own intelligence or judicial system American intelligence had a window into that system not through hacking simply by using the door they had placed there themselves. This is theory but it is precisely this theory that Congress chose to investigate. In 1991, journalist Danny Castellaro, who spent years investigating Promise, was found dead in a hotel bathtub in West Virginia.

Official ruling suicide. His briefcase containing Promise documents had disappeared. That same year, Robert Maxwell, media magnate, named in connection with the alleged international distribution of Promise, died falling from his yacht near the Canary Islands. Official finding accidental death. Two people at the center of this case.

One year, both not alive. In 1992, the House Judiciary Committee published its report. The Department of Justice had deliberately stolen software from Enslaw. The litigation had been manipulated. The internal investigation sabotaged.

The committee recommended a special counsel. The special counsel's report published in 1993 reached the opposite conclusion. No violations had occurred. Two official investigations, two opposing conclusions, no criminal charges, no arrests, no full compensation paid to Hamilton. Here is what the documents actually show.

In March 1981, one year before the INSLAW contract was signed, the Central Intelligence Agency circulated an internal memorandum reference ODP 81-307, later declassified in 2006. Attached to it was a federal software exchange catalog from September 1980 under the heading criminal justice. a single entry. Promise online generalized tracking system. Promise was listed in the CIA's internal software catalog one year before Hamilton's contract, already cataloged, already circulating.

Whether Hamilton was informed, compensated, or consulted is not addressed anywhere in the declassified document. William Hamilton litigated against the United States government for more than two decades. Three times courts at the trial level found for him. Three times those findings were reversed on appeal and law was never restored. The compensation was never fully paid.

What the record shows is this. In 1980, promise was in a CIA catalog. In 1982, the government contracted with its creator for $10 million. By 1985, that creator was bankrupt. By 1987, a federal court ruled the government had stolen his program.

By 1989, the government was publishing descriptions of the system in the Federal Register as its own. No one went to prison. No one apologized. William Hamilton did not build a weapon. He built a tool to make justice more efficient.

The system built to organize justice became the subject of one of the most thoroughly documented acts of institutional injustice in cold war era American history, and almost no one knows his name. The full classified record of what promis was used for and by whom remains sealed. Draw your own conclusions in the comment section. Thank you for watching. Like and subscribe.