THE OCTOPUS: Epilogue
Added 2023-04-12 00:13:31 +0000 UTCThis was actually supposed to be up on Friday just gone but technical issues delayed it. A chill discussion about the journey and our final thoughts on The Octopus story.
Comments
TL;DR: I think PROMIS was worth stealing because it was an extremely mature product for its time that contained tools that although might seem basic by today's standards were far ahead of their time during a time when tools like these weren't available over the internet and would have had to have been manually built by each company. Stealing it was the solution in a world before github. I work in software development and had a hard time figuring out why PROMIS was worth stealing. The documentary explained that it was a relational database management system which describes how basically every application you interact with handles data. This is a clunky analogy but it comes across as mundanely as "they stole the designs for a V6 car engine". But then I did some digging into the history of relational databases and looked at some of the advertising material from Inslaw for the system and it now makes a lot more sense. PROMIS came out at a time when relational databases were just starting to become commercially available. Bill Hamilton said he was most proud of the analytical tools in PROMIS. When you write code today you're using a lot of tools/functions that other people have coded over the past years to decades. Without these, software development would be so slow and arduous - it would be like every time you wanted to build a car engine you first had to construct your own drill and machine your own nuts and bolts from raw materials. Google the "npm left-pad incident" for an example of how important these coding tools become when someone builds them. With the internet, access to these tools is just a download and import away. Back in the 80s I have no idea how you'd get access to these coding tools and I suspect a big part of programming involved actually building these tools in-house at whatever company you worked for. I'm sure there were basic and universally applicable tools that were available on physical media but then they'd probably still have to be further refined to suit your specific programming needs. And considering Bill Hamilton worked at the NSA which prides itself on being decades ahead of the public in areas like math and cryptography, I would bet some of the foundational concepts that helped build these analytic tools were ideas that may not have been widely considered in the public yet or were still in their infancy. So even though V6 engines are everywhere today, during its time PROMIS would have looked like a 2025 model V6 engine at a time when the first V6 engines were being pitched to the public and it also had whatever optimizations and capabilities that have been added to the concept over the past decades.
dadbod_napgod
2025-03-06 18:19:53 +0000 UTCI understand now why the documentary and this other podcast treatment of the story were ultimately unsatisfying. At some point the narrative becomes too encompassing and unwieldy I can see how someone would stop out of being lost and exhausted. Truth be told somewhere in the second half I started to have doubts feeling like the story was unraveling, but by the end it cinched like a zipper through my brain hemispheres. Y'all should be proud for sticking the landing no one has come close to pulling off. Thank you for your work and time to tell a great story.
dadbod_napgod
2025-03-06 05:43:53 +0000 UTCCan't stop recommending this series to people, just brilliant . Great job mate
@noam_praszky
2023-04-17 10:17:34 +0000 UTCJust spent a very amusing few minutes reading the talk page for the wiki entry on PROMIS. A user is Definitely Not Hopping Mad about the podcast. Quote from 12 April: "I don't think the [article] rewrite was successful. The PROMIS software is real, but it is not super spyware. Any attempt to portray it as such must founder on the shoals of reality. Put the simple, accurate description of the software back into Inslaw article. Put the non-existent superspyware into a an article describing the conspiracy theories, call it the octopus or whatever. Done." Unlike our wiki friend, I think the series was great, thank you for making it!
MCR
2023-04-14 22:04:46 +0000 UTCYou're right, there is no real distinction between let/made. If you stand to inherit some money off your nan and you allow some guys to push her down the stairs one day to speed up payday, it's basically the same as if you'd pushed her - you could have stopped it and you didn't.
pinballa
2023-04-12 23:19:23 +0000 UTCThank you for this series Matt, it’s changed my entire world view, eye opening shit
Ibrahim
2023-04-12 22:51:54 +0000 UTCCongratulations fellas—you took on a massive challenge and produced an intelligible work of great value. You plumbed the depths without becoming mired in them—no easy task! Hope you celebrate this achievement, you’ve earned it. Great work.
Brian Stewart
2023-04-12 14:38:46 +0000 UTCOnly thing that puzzles me is what the distinction between let it happen and made it happen is when you understand the broader context of deep networks such as you do. For me that's only a distinction that makes sense if you don't understand how all these seemingly at is organizations are actually fundamentally tied together by various elite interests and parapolitical operatives. If we understand bin laden as being a node in the larger network that is controlled by the network's interests and was facilitated by the same network with concrete steps taken all along the process, the only real distinction is whether you think there was explosives in the towers which I happen to think there were, but it's a much less interesting question than everything else. But I'm now thinking there's probably a fair chance you might touch on this in the episode so this may be a redundant question
Divad Kong
2023-04-12 08:09:54 +0000 UTCJust listened to the last one yesterday, genuinely one of the best summations of things I'm interested I've heard, and another great series in general. Top stuff. Everyone I recommend it to comes back saying they loved it as well, keep doing what you're doing.
Divad Kong
2023-04-12 08:02:38 +0000 UTCThis is a masterpiece series, man
NYCM&AHole
2023-04-12 01:39:07 +0000 UTCStill on ep 5, but I've found this to be so incredibly interesting. Thanks to everyone involved.
Zakir KH
2023-04-12 00:57:38 +0000 UTC
