Larry Ellison's Oracle Started As a CIA Project
gizmodo.com
Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once.
  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once. Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was Oracle’s first customer.

    . . . [Oracle book author] Rosen tells of meeting with the folks at Oracle, one of whom was David Carney, formerly the number three person at the CIA. Carney had retired after 32 years there, and been hired at Oracle to head its Information Assurance Center, founded just two months after the September 11th attacks.

    . . . As Ellison himself told Rosen proudly for The Naked Crowd, “The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database.”

    I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Vox didn’t highlight Oracle’s CIA origins or its never-ending relationship with governments at all levels. But writing an explainer about Oracle without mentioning the CIA or Ellison’s post-9/11 goals or national security infrastructure strikes me as simply bizarre.