PROMISes, Sex Slaves, and Spying: A Brief History of the Blackmail-Surveillance Nexus

 

By PIPR

 

 

5 July, 2025

 

 

 

Key points: Via Robert Maxwell, there is a long-established Mossad-MI6-CIA connection to the modern digital surveillance revolution.  

P.R.O.M.I.S. 

The story of the PROMIS software in the 1970s weaves a complex narrative of foreign double-agents, human trafficking, and murder.

 

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) paid Bill Hamilton of the Washington-based firm, Inslaw, to develop and market the Prosecutors Management Information System (sic, PROMIS). On the surface, the software was a revolutionary universal data reader designed to collate information from multiple government operating systems. But, in 1982, the contract was terminated and a disgruntled Hamilton realised that the DoJ had pirated his software. PROMIS’s capabilities could extend to reading and thus stealing information from banks, intelligence agencies, and militaries. As with Crypto AG, the US began selling PROMIS to foreign governments. Before long, the US government was exporting PROMIS to America’s so-called allies. The scientist Michael Riconosciuto was contracted by the CIA to build backdoors into software sold to Canada.ⁱ

 

Former Israeli signals intelligence spy, Ari Ben-Menashe, alleged that the US sold PROMIS to his country’s government as a plot to trigger a software race in the Middle East. If the Israelis bought into the PROMIS, the plotters reasoned, other governments in the region would follow.ⁱⁱ Via GE Aerosapce, the CIA had attempted to insert backdoors into the software, as had the DoJ’s enforcement arm, the FBI, as well as the NSA.ⁱⁱⁱ It was plausibly alleged that the hardware built into machines that allowed PROMIS to operate had been fitted with early artificial intelligence: Systems Management Automated Reasoning Tools (SMARTs), codenamed Petrie. SMARTs were reportedly miniature antennae built into microchips that would pick all information in the given machine and allow it to be covertly downloaded.^iv These and similar spying devices were developed by long-time US security establishment contractors at Cal-Tech, Harvard, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia Labs, and the University of California.^v

 

 

DEADLY GAME

A series of murders were allegedly committed in order to try to contain the scope of the spying.

 

Freelance journalist Danny Casolaro supposedly slashed his wrists in a hotel room after a source contacted him about the so-called Octopus: an international network of intelligence operatives.^vi Also assassinated was Robert Maxwell, a UK-based publishing magnate, born in Czechoslovakia as Ján Hoch. The young Hoch escaped Nazi occupation and was decorated by the British military for his service to the Allies. MI6 used Maxwell (Hoch) as a front for its publishing arm, Springer-Verlag.^vii

 

Using his contacts with Czech communists, he allegedly facilitated the export of aircraft parts to Israel, which helped the country win the Arab-Israeli War 1948. Maxwell became a Member of Parliament for the British Labour Party and was supposedly suspected by UK intelligence of being a Soviet-funded double-agent, though this appears to have been part of an MI5 smear campaign against the Labour Party.^viii Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, supposedly inserted its own bugs into PROMIS and contracted Maxwell to distribute the rigged software.^ix Maxwell died in 1991 after falling off his yacht.

 

The yacht, Lady Ghislaine, was named after his youngest child. In the same year as her father’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, fixer, and human-trafficker who was working for the CIA to blackmail businesspeople, intellectuals, politicians, and royalty.^x Many suspect that Epstein was also working for Mossad.^xi Epstein also died when details of his dark empire began to emerge: officially by suicide in 2019. Some people suspect that US, British, and/or Israeli intelligence helped Epstein and Maxwell, respectively, to fake their deaths, but there is little evidence to prove these theories. Elements of the Maxwell family continued their father’s interest in software.

 

 

TO THE PRESENT

During the 1980s, PROMIS was distributed by a data-mining company called Information on Demand (IoD). In 1983, the CIA courted Robert Maxwell’s publishing house, Pergamon. Shortly thereafter, Pergamon acquired IoD. The FBI launched an investigation into how the Czech-born Brit with Mossad and possibly Soviet connections came to be involved in apparently bugging US government computers.^xii From 1985 to ‘91, Maxwell’s daughter, Christine, was CEO of IoD, which was rebranded Research on Demand.^xiii In recent years, the website domain has been sold^xiv but there is evidence that the company continues to operate.^xv

 

In 1997, Christine co-founded Chiliad^xvi with then-Chief Information Officer at the CIA, Alan C. Wade,^xvii and Pentagon contractor,^xviii Paul McOwen, who is former Deputy Chair of Massachusetts University’s Computer Science Department.^xix Chiliad was basically an updated version of PROMIS, though there is no evidence that it was spyware. By the mid-2000s and under the rubric of fighting the “war on terror,” the FBI had used Chiliad to amass 659 million records.^xx

 

In 2008, Ghislaine Maxwell’s partner, Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted of procuring a person under 18 and solicitation for prostitution. In public, Epstein was blacklisted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), yet in secret MIT Media Lab’s Director, Joi Ito, continued to receive donations from Epstein’s backers, describing the child-trafficker as “he who must not be named.”^xxi Epstein acted as a conduit for multibillionaires, including Bill Gates. Among other things, the Media Lab developed alleged spyware under the rubric of mental health apps.

 

 

CONCLUSION: INTO THE HEALTH INDUSTRY

One of the most well-known MIT-derived products is Ginger.io, an application supposedly designed as a tool to combat depression. However, an internal memo reportedly describes the app as “a big data company posing as a health care company” (emphasis in original).^xxii As the private consultancy firm Carepaths notes, health apps are glorified spyware, trawling through email, geolocation, text, and search engine data. Ginger.io also reportedly had a contract with the Pentagon.^xxiii

 

This is the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.

 

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