From: greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles)
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 93 23:28:01 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Sterilized Medflies of Crypto
Message-ID: <oDsq8B1w164w@ideath.goldenbear.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


uunet!PROCASE.COM!peb (Paul Baclace) writes:

> The CIA has been accused of stealing a company's source code and
> reselling said software modified with a trojan horse to specific targets
> outside the U.S.  I don't remember the name of the company, but read about 
> the lawsuit pending against the government.  Anyone have more details?
> This is nice evidence for people who think the spooks are fully accountable.

This sounds like the Inslaw thing - a company called Inslaw sold some 
software for case management and person-tracking (intended for use by 
prosecuting attorneys for maintaining dossiers, etc.) to the Justice 
department. Then (the story goes) the Justice department deliberately failed 
to make agreed-upon payments and screwed around with Inslaw's cash flow to 
the point that they were forced into choosing between bankruptcy and selling 
out to another software company owned by cronies of Ed Meese. They chose 
bankruptcy and subsequently sued the Justice Department. The first judge who 
heard the case ruled in Inslaw's favor was not reappointed to his seat. I'm 
unable to remember the specifics of the following events - and the above 
summary probably leaves out important stuff. I've got a few text files on 
this - if folks are interested I can upload them to the soda archives.

This is also related to the "suicide" of writer Danny Casolaro about 2 years 
ago in Washington, D.C. - he was working on a book on this mess, supposedly 
discovered something pretty important, then allegedly killed himself.

Conspiracy stuff abounds with this. Supposedly the PROMIS software has also 
been given to Canadian intelligence/police forces, as well as the Israelis. 
It's a pretty sordid story and frankly I dunno how much of it to believe. I 
don't know if this is exactly relevant to Cypherpunk stuff (and it's long) 
so I'm not posting it to the list, but I can mail or ftp the stuff to 
interested folks.


--
Greg Broiles                            greg@goldenbear.com
Golden Bear Computer Consulting         +1 503 465 0325
Box 12005 Eugene OR 97440               BBS: +1 503 687 7764