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Canada's national police force, twice drawn into the PROMIS affair: by a mistaken 1991 software inventory and by its own 1999-2000 inquiry, Project Abbreviation. | Ottawa, Canada | 2025-08-05 | 2026-09-22 |
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is Canada's national police force. It figures twice in the PROMIS Software Scandal.
The 1991 Inventory
In November 1990 and January 1991 officials of the Department of Communications and the Canadian Workplace Automation Research Centre told Patricia Hamilton of INSLAW that PROMIS was running at "more than 900 locations" in the federal government, and one said the RCMP was among the users; an RCMP officer in Ottawa told her on February 1, 1991, that he knew of no PROMIS in the force. The officials later said they had confused INSLAW's product with a project-management package of the same name sold by the Strategic Software Planning Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. On December 4, 1991, the Canadian ambassador wrote to the House Committee on the Judiciary that "the RCMP and CSIS report they do not use any case management software," a letter the committee called "conclusory." The Department of Justice's review of 1994 concluded that the Canadian "PROMIS" was "a totally different program developed by a different company."1
Project Abbreviation
In 1999 and 2000 the force ran its own national security inquiry, Project Abbreviation, under Sean McDade, an Ottawa-Carleton regional police officer on secondment, into whether software used by Canadian agencies was a version of PROMIS with a hidden access point for American and Israeli intelligence. When the Toronto Star disclosed it on August 25, 2000, Sergeant Marc Richer said, "I cannot either confirm or deny what you're looking into"; Staff Sergeant Mike Gaudet said the next day that it had been under way "for some time" and had found "absolutely nothing to indicate that national security has been compromised in any way." On September 16, 2000, Gaudet announced its end: "We're saying today that we do not have Promis software."2 The account of the inquiry from McDade's side, including a meeting of allied intelligence chiefs at Los Alamos National Laboratory in December 1999 and his belief that he had been targeted by ECHELON, comes from Cheri Seymour.3
Footnotes
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U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The INSLAW Affair, H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, section on Canada; Hamilton, Patricia C., affidavit, February 1991, INSLAW, Inc. v. United States, Adv. Proc. No. 86-0069 (Bankr. D.D.C.); U.S. Department of Justice, Report on the Review of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua's Report, September 27, 1994, "The Alleged Distribution of Enhanced PROMIS to Canada." ↩︎
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Lawton, Valerie, and Allan Thompson, "Spy computer 'trap' probed," Toronto Star, August 25, 2000; Thompson, Allan, and Valerie Lawton, "RCMP admit they're investigating 'trap'," Toronto Star, August 26, 2000; Lawton, Valerie, and Allan Thompson, "Mounties end probe of Promis," Toronto Star, September 16, 2000; texts as forwarded to the CTRL mailing list, https://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg49408.html, msg49544.html and msg50988.html. ↩︎
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Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎