--- alias: - PROMIS in Canada - RCMP PROMIS investigation category: Intelligence Scandal created: 2026-09-22 end: 2000-09 location: Ottawa start: 1990-11 summary: The RCMP's 1999-2000 national security inquiry, run by Sean McDade, into whether a trap-doored PROMIS ran in Canadian agencies, disclosed by the Toronto Star in August 2000, nine years after a CWARC inventory error had first set INSLAW and the House Judiciary Committee on the Canadian trail. tags: - Event - ProjectAbbreviation - PROMIS - RCMP - CSIS - Canada - INSLAW updated: 2026-09-22 --- Project Abbreviation was the code name of a [RCMP](/organizations/royal-canadian-mounted-police/) national security investigation, conducted through 1999 and 2000 by the investigator [Sean McDade](/people/sean-mcdade/), whose email handle was "simorp," into whether software used by Canadian federal agencies, including the RCMP itself and the [CSIS](/organizations/canadian-security-intelligence-service/), was a version of [INSLAW](/organizations/inslaw/)'s [PROMIS](/programs/promis/) fitted with a "trap door" giving American and Israeli intelligence access to Canadian data. The *Toronto Star* disclosed it on August 25, 2000, in a report by Valerie Lawton and Allan Thompson; Reuters reported the same day that "Canadian police are investigating whether U.S. and Israeli spies used rigged computer software to hack into Canada's top secret intelligence files," and that the Mounties "had interviewed a number of people linked to the Promis affair." The same day the RCMP spokesman Staff Sergeant Mike Gaudet told the Globe and Mail that the inquiry, under way for "several months," had produced "absolutely nothing to date to indicate national security has been compromised in any way," adding that the force had to investigate every allegation of the kind. The CSIS spokesman Dan Lambert said the service had conducted "its own in-depth review in 1991 and found that it had no copies of Promis, bootlegged or otherwise, and never had." On September 16, 2000, the Star reported the end of the inquiry, with Gaudet stating: "We're saying today that we do not have Promis software."[^1][^2] ### The 1991 Origin The Canadian trail began with a survey. On November 5, 1990, Marc Valois of the federal Department of Communications telephoned Patricia Hamilton, the Hamiltons' daughter and INSLAW's sales manager for Canada, to say that INSLAW's PROMIS was "currently operating in agencies and departments of the Federal Government of Canada" at "more than 900 locations," and in January 1991 the Canadian Workplace Automation Research Centre sent INSLAW vendor questionnaires on the same premise. In Montreal on January 30, 1991, Denis LaChance of the department told her the RCMP was running the software at 900 locations; an RCMP officer at headquarters in Ottawa told her on February 1 that he knew of no PROMIS in the force and to disregard the letters. INSLAW, which swore it had never sold PROMIS to any Canadian agency, filed her affidavit in the bankruptcy court in February 1991. Chairman [Jack Brooks](/people/jack-brooks/) of the House Committee on the Judiciary asked the Canadian embassy for access to the officials; the embassy's Jonathan Fried, reluctant "having been burned" before, allowed interviews on March 22 or 23, 1991, only with government counsel present, not under oath, and on condition the men never became public witnesses. Valois and LaChance then said they had identified the software wrongly: the "PROMIS" in Canadian use was a project-management package of the same name sold by the Strategic Software Planning Corporation of Massimo Grimaldi, who swore he had sold a few copies to Public Works Canada and the Canadian International Development Agency in May 1986; the RCMP had not been part of the survey. On December 4, 1991, the Canadian ambassador wrote that "the RCMP and CSIS report they do not use any case management software." The committee called the letter "conclusory" and wrote in 1992 that "without direct access to RCMP, CSIS and other Canadian officials, the committee has been effectively thwarted in its attempt to support or reject the contention that INSLAW software was transferred to the Canadian Government." The Justice Department's 1994 review traced the error to "a college student working on the inventory" and concluded that "the 'PROMIS' program in use by certain Canadian agencies is not a version of INSLAW's PROMIS but rather a totally different program developed by a different company."[^3][^4] ### The 2000 Investigation McDade's inquiry, authorized at the top of the force, took him secretly into the United States in February 2000, to [Cheri Seymour](/people/cheri-seymour/) and the Hercules, California, detective [Sue Todd](/people/sue-todd/), to the files behind Seymour's book on [Danny Casolaro](/people/danny-casolaro/), and to former investigators of the PROMIS and Cabazon matters, and back to a "war room" in Ottawa; the account of the investigation from his side is on his page. The Star's reports of August 2000 quoted the RCMP spokesman Sergeant Marc Richer ("I cannot either confirm or deny what you're looking into"); Louis Buffardi, Riconosciuto's lawyer, who said RCMP officers had interviewed his client "eight or nine months" earlier and were "probing a possible breach of Canada's national security"; the former Justice Department PROMIS project manager [C. Madison Brewer](/people/c-madison-brewer/), who called the allegations "fantasy"; and McDade: "I kind of get a chuckle out of how something so small has been blown out of proportion." [Ari Ben-Menashe](/people/ari-ben-menashe/) told the paper that Canadian authorities had questioned him about PROMIS seven years earlier, during the security screening for his citizenship. On August 26 the Star reported, from unnamed sources, that the inquiry also concerned allegations that [Robert Maxwell](/people/robert-maxwell/) "may have acted as a middleman in selling the rigged software to Canada," and that a second former Israeli spy, "now living in New York," had been interviewed. [Bill Hamilton](/people/bill-hamilton/) said he had spoken with the chief investigator "probably dozens" of times and that his sources put the sale to Canada at 31 million dollars in 1983. After the closure Hamilton said McDade had earlier told him that the RCMP acquired PROMIS "from a company in Massachusetts" and that it "was modified by a Toronto firm," and Seymour told the Star: "(McDade) said that they had a paper trail on the Promis software being purchased by the RCMP. He told me that." The Star described McDade as "an Ottawa-Carleton regional police officer on secondment to the RCMP" who had refused its requests for an interview.[^2] [Michael Riconosciuto](/people/michael-riconosciuto/)'s affidavit of March 21, 1991, had sworn that "some of the modifications that I made were specifically designed to facilitate the implementation of PROMIS within two agencies of the Government of Canada: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS)," and that "the proprietary version of PROMIS, as modified by me, was, in fact, implemented in both"; the special counsel [Nicholas J. Bua](/people/nicholas-j-bua/) had found him "totally unreliable." A second Canadian witness, the former Nesbitt Thomson broker John A. Belton, told the department's 1994 reviewers that CSIS had bought 10 to 12 million dollars of PROMIS in 1984 and that [Earl Brian](/people/earl-brian/) had sold it to the Bank of Montreal for 2 million dollars in May 1987, without producing any document; they found him "unbelievable." Fourteen months after the Star's disclosure, on October 16, 2001, Fox News reported that "Canada has actually investigated potential tampering with its Promis programs" as a live example in its story on [Robert Hanssen](/people/robert-hanssen/) and Osama bin Laden. The Canadian government's Access to Information index lists a request for RCMP records "mentioning 'PROMIS,' 'INSLAW,' 'PROJECT ABBREVIATION,' or 'PROMIS software' and by RCMP investigator Sean McDade" from 1991 to 2001.[^1][^4][^5] [^1]: Reuters, "Canada investigating computer hacking by U.S. and Israel spies," CNN.com, August 25, 2000; Sallot, Jeff, "Mounties probe software allegations," *The Globe and Mail,* August 26, 2000. [^2]: 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, "American claims pirated software sold to Canada," *Toronto Star,* August 27, 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. Seymour, Cheri, *The Last Circle,* TrineDay, 2010, for McDade's side. [^3]: Hamilton, Patricia C., affidavit, February 1991, Exhibit 1, *INSLAW, Inc. v. United States,* Adv. Proc. No. 86-0069 (Bankr. D.D.C.), archive.org item "INSLAW-Canada"; House Judiciary Committee investigative file "INSLAW - Canada (HOUSE)," memorandum of Ned M. Friece and interviews of March 23, 1991, archive.org item "INSLAW-CanadaHOUSE" (the House report gives the interview date as March 22). [^4]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, *The INSLAW Affair,* H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, section on Canada; 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" and the Belton interview. [^5]: Riconosciuto's affidavit as reproduced in U.S. Department of Justice, *Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua,* March 1993, pp. 44-45; Fox News, *Special Report with Brit Hume,* October 16, 2001, Carl Cameron segment, transcript as reproduced at Boing Boing, October 17, 2001; Government of Canada, Open Government, Access to Information summary d596fa1b822b7eed3421bcabd4cf9fd5 (not opened).