Promis And Computer Paranoia

By Kenn Thomas
(kennthomas@umsl.edu)
July 18, 2001

Editor's Note: Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, the conspiracy theory magazine. Four issue subscription: $23; single issue: $6, from POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. The Octopus: The Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro (Feral House, 1995), written with the late Jim Keith, is also available. A revised and updated edition is scheduled for 2002 publication.

The research of Danny Casolaro, the writer who died in Martinsberg, West Virginia while investigating an intelligence cabal called the Octopus, continues to contextualize current events in ways that the mainstream media fail at daily.

At the start of the Clinton administration, Casolaro's work illuminated Vince Foster's death, when speculation began on how the banking systems got PROMIS, the software system so crucial to Casolaro's research.

PROMIS had been stolen from the Inslaw company by Ed Meese cronies in the US Justice department under Ronald Reagan, and its infamous "back door" - allowing the Octo-cronies to spy on the clients that had bought PROMIS illegally. According to one theory, Foster's Swiss bank accounts were made vulnerable in this way and may have led to his suicide or murder.

Casolaro's name came up in the periphery again after the Heaven's Gate cult incident when it became apparent that the last significant news from the area where the cult lived, Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego, involved the murders of Ian Spiro and his family.

Spiro was a British intelligence spook who had been helping Casolaro's main informant, the creator of the PROMIS back door, Michael Riconosciuto.

Finally, even the death of Princess Diana has a tentacle reaching back to the Octopus in the form of Adnan Khashoggi, Dodi Fayed's uncle. Khashoggi's signature appeared on a document that had excited Casolaro on the day that he died.

That very night he was to meet with someone named "Ibrahim" who would have shed more light on Khashoggi's role in the Iran-contra scandal. Khashoggi is a notorious arms merchant responsible for developing supra-legal contracts that sustain Middle-East defense and oil industry corruption. Those politics certainly play a role in whatever happened to Diana and Dodi Fayed in the Pont de I'Alma tunnel.

Of most interest to the desktop conspiracy student, however, is the ongoing development of PROMIS-like back doors that have been popping up to spy on average personal computer users. Rumor had it that when the original versions of Windows 95 appeared, they contained a back door that surreptitiously read the user's hard drive and reported it back to Bill Gates.

The rumor came with the story that pressing some key combination during the opening "clouds" screen of Windows 95 brought to the screen a photograph of a prized Palomino owned by Gates. The first draft of Casolaro's book on the Octopus was entitled Behold, a Pale Horve.

The back door feature ostensibly was removed from later versions of Windows 95 and today it has a registration that does the same thing, only with the consent of the spied upon.

Presently there is no indication of how it works with the pre-installed software often bought by many noncomputer-savvy people.

Encryption security and the Clipper chip--a "front door" strategy for keeping tabs on the Intemet--became issues with the general public. Philip Zimmerman used a public domain algorithm to create the Pretty Good Privacy encryption software and publicized it freely, bringing that protection to the masses.

However, even the cyberheads have trouble dealing with PROMIS-like phenomena that may not even exist. Back door access has enough obvious political espionage applications to ensure that the problem will never go away, and even some business managers still today claim the right to spy on worker e-mail. So, odd little PROMIS-like "back doors" keep sneaking on to the cyberscape.

In January 2000, a "glitch" in the protocol for removing phone listings from the Yahoo site gave private address listings by punching in phone numbers. Glitches found in the Netscape browser in the mid 1990s, one that allowed Netscape to extract the history of a user's session and another that subverted encryption/decryption operations, won $ 1,000 from a bug-bounty hunter group for two young hackers in Australia and San Francisco.

Perhaps it is not surprising that two years later -presumably long after it fixed these other bugs - Netscape awarded another thousand dollars plus a T-shirt to a Danish software company called Cabocomm when it discovered another glitch. This one allowed Web site operators to read anything stored on the hard-drive of a computer logged on to their site.

The biggest concern over these matters is the protection of credit card information on the Web/Net. Others throw up their hands and declare that they have nothing subversive on their hard drives, so there is no reason to be concerned about this espionage--despite the affront it poses to supposedly cherished democratic principles. Still others simply do not believe that the technological capacity exists to do these things, a supposition that has been mirrored in the discussion about PROMIS itself.

Daniel Brandt, producer of CIABase, and a renowned data engine on intelligence literature and personalities called NameBase, argued that

"a 'back door' to get around password protection is easy for any programmer . . . [but] you still need physical access to the computer, either through a direct-connect terminal or remote terminal through the phone lines, in order to utilize back door. [It is difficult] to believe that foreigners allow technicians from another country to install new computer systems in the heart of their intelligence establishments, and don't even think to secure physical access to the system before they start entering their precious data . . . claims that PROMIS . . . can suck in every other database on earth, such as those used by utility companies, and correlate everything automatically . . . needlessly discredit [whistle blowers] by their own high-tech gullibility."

Bill Hamilton, the owner of Inslaw - the company that originally developed PROMIS - maintained that it could run on "an UNIX machine, Hewlett Packard UNIX, RISC 6000, AT&T AS400 under its own operating system and on mainframes unde MVS," that it was comprised of 88 program modules, and that the source code-replete with the Inslaw name throughout the code commentary - was kept by any government that had it.

When asked how a foreign country could modify the source code without discovering the back door, Hamilton was cryptic:

"I don't know what's meant by the back door. What we've been told is that not only the software was sold, but computers with extra chips . . . What the chips do, we've been told, the extra chips, is to broadcast the data inside PROMIS to satellites owned by the NSA . . . but we don't know enough about it as they've never shared anything with us."

This possibility perhaps addresses Daniel Brandt's objections that physical access is required for a back door to work.

Writer J. Orlin Grabbe elaborated on the idea in a column:

"Since intelligence computers are, for security reasons usually not connected to external networks, the original back door was a broadcast signal. The PROMIS software was often sold in connection with computer hardware (such as a Prime computer) using a specialized chip. The chip would broadcast the contents of the existing database to monitoring vans of collection satellites using digital spread spectrum techniques whenever the software was run. Spread spectrum techniques offer a way to mask, or disguise, a signal by making it appear as 'noise' with respect to another signal. For example, one may communicate covertly on the same spectrum as a local TV broadcast signal.

From the point of view of a TV receiver, the covert communication appears as noise, and is filtered out. From the point of view of the covert channel, the TV signal appears as noise. In the case of the PROMIS broadcast channel, the signal was disguised as ordinary computer noise . . ."

Unfortunately, thereafter Grabbe's discussion, which includes correspondence with PROMIS architect Michael Riconosciuto, becomes more technical than is useful to a nontechnical understanding of how PROMIS works.

It is the same with remarks about further criticism from Daniel Brandt, penned by Riconosciuto, that have circulated among conspiracy researchers. For example, Riconosciuto states that, "as far as the requirement of special hardware to transmit data and the example that Mr. Brandt uses that software can only alone supply various combinations of ones and zeros to the CPU, only shows Mr. Brandt's lack of knowledge of what WALSH functions are . . . Brandt's comments start out that computers radiate electromagnetic energy unless they are shielded."

This is an insult.

"Anybody who has been around knows what Van Eck hacking is? [Editor's Note: Named after the Dutch scientist Wim Van Eck, who published a Computers and Security journal article (December 1985) on "Van Eck" or "Tempest" phreaking, which he had developed since January 1983. Since computer monitors and other equipment emits faint radiation, Van Eck was able to eavesdrop on these transmissions, scan the information, and display it on a modified television set. He used readily available equipment, including a directional antenna, an antenna amplifier, a variable oscillator and a frequency divider. The technique became popular for industrial espionage and has been reportedly used by various US government agencies. Plans for Van Eck units, and manuals, are commercially available.] "

"An active phased array antenna is superfluous at the short distances he describes. A high performance surveillance receiver such as those made for Vatkins Johnson Corporation, Stoddarts/Singer or Fairchild will do the job quite nicely with a standard Biconical antenna . . . Brandt will find that if an arbitrarily small section of a Sine function is known, the function is known everywhere. This feature of sine wave is referenced to sinusoidal waves transmit information at a net rate of zero!"

"Mr. Brandt's statement that software can only provide combinations of ones and zeros to the CPU totally misses the point that Walsh functions are inherently suited to binary operations. This is one reason why such tight, compact code can be written around operations with Walsh functions. It is is why it is so difficult find these routines and differentiate them from routines normally used at the register transfer logic level."

"This is at level of programming that is one jump lower than machine language."

Whch is, of course, several steps above the average person's ability to follow. It seems almost inarguable that the PROMIS software has properties and applications to military and industrial skullduggery that surpass the threats it seems to pose to hackers, conspiracy students, and the other riffraff who populate the cybersphere.

In addition to being a bell-ringer for the dangers PROMIS posed to the average person, Casolaro died in part trying to uncover its other, perhaps more sinister capacities. Michael Riconosciuto has been as vociferous as possible about it for someone in his position-in prison on trumped-up drug charges.

This part of the story is still unfolding.