Inslaw Inc.
| Private | |
| Industry | Information Technology |
| Founded | Washington, D.C., U.S. (March 3, 1982) |
| Founder | William Anthony Hamilton |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Products | CJIS, MODULAW, PROMIS |
| Website | http://www.inslawinc.com |
Inslaw, Inc. is a Washington, D.C. based information technology company. In the mid-1970s, Inslaw developed for the United States Department of Justice a computer program known as Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw's principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings.
During the ensuing investigations, the Department of Justice was accused of deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations against foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan.
Inslaw, once called the Institute for Law and Social Research, was a non-profit business created in 1974 by William Anthony Hamilton, "a former analyst with the National Security Agency and onetime contract employee of the CIA." Inslaw's original software product, Promis, was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. Promis was a people-tracking program which had the power to integrate innumerable databases regardless of their languages, or regardless of their operating platforms. "Every use of Promis in the court system is tracking people," explained Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."
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