Continued from Part I

By now you’ve heard about “PRISM”, the NSA surveillance program so all encompassing it can “watch your ideas as they form”, to quote Edward Snowden’s assessment of its capabilities. What you probably haven’t heard about is a database and pattern recognition program by the name of “PROMIS”, the circa 1982 granddaddy progenitor of today’s mass surveillance systems. Why haven’t you heard about PROMIS before? There’s a number of reasons not the least of which is journalists who get too deep into the story have a nasty habit of turning up dead, usually under very suspicious circumstances. (Source) An astrological consideration of PROMIS is certainly in order at this time because, as an early 1990’s Australian news program “A Current Affair” describes it, the PROMIS saga revolves around “spying on a scale never before imagined”:

Using the date of its creation as its date of birth, PROMIS is a Pisces Sun, Gemini Moon. (Chart) Astrologer Linda Goodman observes that Pisces “absorbs people’s feeling and emotions like a psychic sponge” while Gemini “always wants something to read.” (Source) As explained in a previous article, this pairing can get so good at connecting, collating, and cross-indexing subtle impressions from the psychic world (Pisces) with data driven perceptions from the information world (Gemini) that he or she will seem to sense your thoughts before you do:

Short for “Prosecutor’s Management Information System”, PROMIS was originally intended as a federal case management tool. Designed by former NSA analyst Bill Hamilton, it worked by reading and integrating a wide variety of previously non-compatible databases into a single elegant, searchable, private proto-Google. This enabled the prosecutor to peer into previously “hidden layers” (Pisces) of a case to “uncover less visible facts” by “spotting, observing, and articulating” (Gemini) all the actions of the defendants, witnesses, arresting officers, judges, detectives, and defense lawyers in all their previous cases. (Source) When all that information was cross-collated and analyzed it became easy to predict which defense attorney and/or which judge was going to take which course of action in which case with what degree of probability. A legal strategy that might have taken months or years to research and develop before PROMIS could now be decided upon in nano-seconds. For the attorneys with access to it, PROMIS was, in effect, a micro-processor powered crystal ball.

Intelligence agencies quickly realized that with a few modifications PROMIS could be altered to quickly cross-collate and analyze a target’s bank deposits/withdrawals, credit card transactions, insurance files, stock investments, book purchases, phone calls, geographic movements, as well as those of all their associates out to several degrees of separation. When all of that information is overlaid with data from reconnaissance satellites, surveillance cameras, and license plate readers the resulting dossier is astonishing in its thoroughness. Investment banker Catherine Austin Fitts, the Assistant Secretary of HUD during the Bush I administration, has said the film Enemy of the State is a good approximation of what these systems were capable of back around 1992. Today the systems are run not by humans sitting in front of terminals but by automated, artificial intelligence powered super-computers that compile high detail, low-cost, real time dossiers on the entire population, not just selected troublemakers. (Source) What’s depicted in Enemy of the State is thus more than a generation out of date but if you fast forward to 00:48 of this scene you’ll at least get a decent, if fictionalized, visual reference for how invisible (Pisces) connections (Gemini) can be discerned with PROMIS progeny:

According to LAPD narcotics detective turned investigative reporter Michael C. Ruppert, by the turn of the millennium the system had mutated into an automated, algorithm driven Hydra, with a computerized “head” invisibly (Pisces) peering (Gemini) into every database and through every camera on the planet 24 hours a day. (Source) In other words, how modern government surveillance is less “FBI agent listening in on your phone calls” and more “All Seeing Eye, Version 2.0”:

There are, of course, perfectly legal and reasonable uses for PROMIS. According to Bill Hamilton, it’s now routinely used to by banks, insurance companies, and law enforcement to spot everything from identity theft to insider trading to insurance fraud to tax evasion. By 2007, the technology had advanced to the point that credit card companies could even predict which married couples would get divorced with a 95% plus rate of accuracy just by running their credit card transactions through AI-powered “data waterfalls”. (Source) That’s more accurate than most psychics (Pisces), no matter how many inquiries (Gemini) they make.

The software’s predictive abilities come alive via the power of what’s known as “block modeling”, a process IBM pioneered beginning in the 1980s when it began building computerized models of its own employees. (Source) (It’s now called “dimensional modeling”) How it works: let’s assume a person is so unique that they’re one in a million. That means there’s 350 other people with their exact psychological profile just in the United States alone. Even the most unique person’s thoughts can thus be predicted with a high degree of accuracy based on what the other 349 people in their respective data “block” have done or thought in similar situations. If an agency or corporation can data mine all of a person or community’s emails, phone calls, google searches, banking records, etc, then automatically compare and cross-analyze those against the same data mined from all the other persons and/or communities in similar “blocks” the resulting psychological profiles start to get extraordinarily granular. The software is so powerful that, according to a 1991 Vanity Fair article, journalist Danny Casolaro was murdered for his investigation into it. Dubbed “the Octopus conspiracy”, the story even made an episode of the television series Unsolved Mysteries. Fast forward to 4:07, you’ll even get to see Bill Hamilton, the man who developed PROMIS in the first place:

Astrologers Suzi and Charles Harvey tell us the Pisces/Gemini pairing has internal “lines of communication” which are used to “keep a running commentary on people and situations” (Source) That’s exactly how PROMIS works, by accessing every “line of communication” imaginable to keep running, real-time dossiers (“commentaries”) on not only people but also entire governments, organizations, neighborhoods, corporations, communities, ecosystems, families, and financial markets. According to a UK Register article entitled “War Games on the Grandest Scale”, the Pentagon has been utilizing PROMIS like systems to build virtual reality computer simulations of all 6.5 billion people on the planet since 2007. The system, called the “Sentient World Simulation” is, for all intents and purposes, a psychic (Pisces) data exchange (Gemini) — one that can predict the likely actions of an individual or community years before they’ve even thought to take them. That sounds like something out of a futuristic science fiction movie but it’s actually already decade old technology. According to a recent PBS article, in the early-to-mid 2000s the National Security Agency developed a computer system called “AQUAINT” (Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence), an artificial intelligence powered black box agents can query to find out what person X thinks about subject Y. (Source) AQUAINT is, in effect, a psychic surveillance system — one whose lineage can almost certainly be traced back to the PROMIS software originally designed by Bill Hamilton and stolen from his company INSLAW.

When Jefferson Anderson wrote in 1978 that the Pisces/Gemini pairing is “actually several clever individuals inside of one and can play any part in order to get what you want” he had no idea just how accurate he was. (Source) The ability of PROMIS progeny to manipulate any database (“play any part”) makes them extremely effective at enabling subtle manipulation of both groups and individuals, from Wall Streeters to whistle-blowers, multi-national corporations to localized protest movements. Suffice it to say, it’s a excellent tool for blackmail and intimidation. Those old school J. Edgar Hoover tactics, while still useful, are crude child’s play compared to where PROMIS progeny really shine. When integrated with the latest advancements in neural networking and parallel processing they can perform not only surveillance but also intervention in the systems being monitored: cell phones, power grids, court systems, oil rigs, research facilities, traffic lights, automobiles, stock markets, email accounts, tax and regulatory records, anything computerized. (Source) Whoever wrote the 1992 Robert Redford film Sneakers had such a detailed understanding of PROMIS software’s capabilities that it’s amazing the movie was even allowed to be made. In one particularly chilling scene, Redford’s team realize the software can be used not only for theft and espionage but to do things like artificially shut down parts of the power grid or even to crash passenger jets by manipulating air traffic control systems:

As coincidence would have it, PROMIS dervied software was on the computers of the FAA, NORAD, the Secret Service, and the White House the day of the 9/11 attacks. (Source)

Using its original air date as its date of birth, the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is also a Pisces/Gemini — one whose plot bears more than a few similarities to the PROMIS software saga. (Chart) In the episode space aliens on a secret mission use advanced technology to manipulate a town’s electrical and telecommunications grid, plunging the residents into a frenzy of paranoia, suspicion, chaos, and violent scapegoating. A 2002 reboot of the series replaced the team of invading space aliens with a secret Pentagon unit tasked with stoking people’s fears of terrorism.

In the epilogue to “Monsters” Rod Serling stated, “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts . . .” Unfortunately, as events of the last decade have made clear, the mass weaponization of our thoughts is no longer something confined to the Twilight Zone.

About the Author: Matt Savinar is a California licensed attorney (State Bar #228957), voluntarily inactive as of June 2013. He can be reached for questions, comments, or consults at his contact page.