Sean McDade

Sean McDade, an Ottawa-Carleton regional police officer on secondment to the RCMP, ran Project Abbreviation, the force's inquiry into whether software used by Canadian agencies was a version of INSLAW's PROMIS fitted with a "trap door" for American and Israeli intelligence. His email handle, "simorp," was PROMIS spelled backward.¹²

The Public Record

The Toronto Star disclosed the inquiry on August 25, 2000. Reached by telephone, McDade said: "You're putting me in a bad spot here. I can't comment on what's happening right now... I kind of get a chuckle out of how something so small has been blown out of proportion." The RCMP's Sergeant Marc Richer said, "I cannot either confirm or deny what you're looking into"; Staff Sergeant Mike Gaudet confirmed the next day that an investigation had been under way "for some time" and had found "absolutely nothing to indicate that national security has been compromised"; the CSIS spokesman Dan Lambert said the service had reviewed the question in 1991 and never held a copy of the software. Louis Buffardi, lawyer for Michael Riconosciuto, said RCMP officers had interviewed his client "eight or nine months" earlier.¹² On September 16, 2000, the Star reported the end of the inquiry, with Gaudet saying, "We're saying today that we do not have Promis software." McDade had refused the paper's requests for an interview. Bill Hamilton of INSLAW said he had spoken with McDade "probably dozens" of times and that McDade had earlier told him the RCMP acquired PROMIS "from a company in Massachusetts" and that it "was modified by a Toronto firm"; Cheri Seymour told the Star that McDade "said that they had a paper trail on the Promis software being purchased by the RCMP. He told me that."² In May 2024 the RCMP answered an access to information request for any documents from 1991 to 2001 mentioning PROMIS, INSLAW or Project Abbreviation, and by McDade, that no records exist.³

McDade's Account

The rest of what is known of the inquiry comes from Seymour, who met McDade in Southern California on February 19, 2000, with the Hercules, California, detective Sue Todd. In her account the inquiry was authorized at the top of the force and well funded; McDade had learned of a meeting in December 1999 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, of intelligence chiefs of the United States, Britain, Israel and Canada on Y2K problems, and had been told by sources that the four countries shared one computer system, possibly PROMIS, and that the Mossad may have built a "two-way" back door into it. He told Seymour that Canadian officials might have bought the software unlawfully from officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, that the RCMP had traced banking transactions supporting this, and that a successful inquiry "could cause the entire U.S. Republican Party to be dismantled." He spent three days copying her files before setting up a "war room" in Ottawa, and over eight months interviewed former investigators and informants, among them Scott Lawrence, whose Customs inquiry on the Maine border, "The Indo-China Project," had been closed after he and his supervisor, John (Tim) Kelly, asked for grand juries to depose CIA officials. McDade believed he had been targeted by ECHELON while in the United States. Todd told Seymour that he later returned to police work in his hometown.¹