Oracle Is Everywhere
The fact is that Oracle Corporation's products are used in almost
every corporate website in the United States, as well as the majority of
U. S. corporations and U. S. government agencies.
The fact is that when the unsuspecting support person has problems and
contacts Oracle Corporation's technical support, they are asked to
export the schema - and sometimes, the data - and to upload it to Oracle
Corporation. This has probably been going on, twenty-four hours a day,
365 days a year, since 1985 or so.
Based upon information and belief, a lot of this data is confidential.
Securing The Data
Indeed, the whole concept of encrypted, or 'translucent', databases,
evolved in response to this belated realization, that the data is not
secure from the data's administrators (and as long as the encryption
keys are kept in a database, the security is still suspect).
Indeed, I recall of one such administrator - my former manager at Oracle
Corporation, at the time of my termination, Burt Demchick - boasting how
he could, simply by adding a record to a table, at a particular customer's
database, get a check issued, to anyone, for any amount.
Not On The Same Page
It's not clear to me that everyone at Oracle Corporation is on the
same page, quite frankly, where conformance to California, United States,
and other laws are concerned - it's almost as if some of these individuals
operate under
another law altogether ... or no law at all, perhaps.
Consider the implications of the following statement - in a legal context,
for instance, say, while someone is testifying, under oath:
"One important law that can be derived from the above is that if one does
find himself or herself in a situation where they must lie, the correct way
to do this is to use words that may have another meaning, vague statements,
or through the use of half-truths (Chofetz Chaim, Hilchos Issurei Rechilus
1:8; Sefer Chassidim 642).
This is somewhat similar to the "mental reservation" loophole discussed by
Bok (1999, pp. 35-36). A mental reservation works as follows: "If you say
something misleading to another and merely add a qualification to it in your
mind so as to make it true, you cannot be responsible for the
misinterpretation made by the listener."
Should Moral Individuals Ever Lie? Insights from Jewish Law
(published at
http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/hf_LyingPermissible.html)
(One of the authors of this document is a professor of economics,
by the way.)
Disneyland Pirates
In 1992, I recall, a group of VPs staged some sort of event for
Larry Ellison, in the parking lot in front of 500 Oracle
Parkway - involving a sailing ship, flying a black flag with a skull
and crossbones motif.
It's not clear whether this was an allusion to piracy ... or a proclamation
to the world, that Oracle Corporation had a letter of marque from
some government, somewhere ... but the message was pretty clear - they were
pirates, and he was their pirate chief. And they didn't care who knew it.
Dubious Allegiances
It's not clear to me where the allegiances of the majority of Oracle
Corporation's employees lay ... then, or now.
Historically, given the statistical makeup of the company, it's almost
certain that there is a significant amount of nepotism; this
renders organizational structures designed to limit the spread of
confidential information ineffective.
A significant minority of these employees are not American citizens. Given
the size of the company and the prominence of the products and their
relevance to the intelligence community, it's not clear to me
how many of these people are in the employ of foreign intelligence
agencies, but in a population of 42000 (at last report) employees,
there must be at least a few hundred moles in management, alone.
One of the products, I surmise, that Oracle may have offered its special
customers, was an application which could be used to track who knew whom.
When I came to Oracle, in 1992, there was already in use, within the company,
a command-line utility emp that could be used to traverse a table of
employee-manager relationships maintained by the HR Department's database and
report on any employee-manager relationship in the company. One could use it
recursively, to look up who reported to whom, all the way up the ladder. The
emp database was used as an example in Oracle's training courses.
INSLAW and PROMIS
This was probably a few years after the
PROMIS scandal, a poorly hushed up story about some unlicensed software
designed to do something similar for intelligence analysts, that had been
deployed by the government without the requisite licensing, and had, it was
alleged, led to an investigative reporter's death. INSLAW, the company which
had developed the software, was represented by former US Attorney General
Eliot Richardson, and the case led to hearings before the House Judiciary
Committee.
It's unlikely that all this furor was missed by Oracle, or its customers, and
it's not unlikely that someone expressed an interest in something similar, to
Oracle. At the heart of PROMIS was a database, after all. The rest was just
tables, queries and maybe a user interface of some sort.
Who Knows Whom?
The interesting thing about this sort of database is that, not knowing who is
a secret agent of another country, and who is not, you end up tracking all of
the people your suspect communicates with, and all of the people they
communicate with, et caetera, ad infinitum, until you have either run out of
disk space on your computer, or have a record for every one of the planet's
inhabitants.
(The April, 2004 edition of
Doctor Dobb's Journal discusses this sort of
database in the article titled Simulating Small-World Networks, where
a database is used to track relationships between movie stars. This is also
known as the
six degrees of separation phenomenon.)
It's my guess that the latter is the case - there are databases that strive to
maintain a record on every single living human being in existence - because
there are only, what, eight billion or so records worth of data. Call it maybe
8 to 16 terabytes of data, at least, tracking who's related to whom and who
talks to whom - invaluable when fighting terrorism or dissent, a must-have for
every would-be international power.
It's pretty likely Israel has such a database, incidentally - they have a
vested interest in being able to distinguish between their friends, and
everyone else, and the Jewish people have probably always struggled to keep
track of who was a member of their community, as well - another excellent
use for databases is tracking genetic relationships. But they are hardly
alone in this, today, or historically.
Influence Peddling?
A little thought leads to the conclusion that knowing who talks to whom must
be of some value to someone. It's my guess that influence peddling follows
shortly thereafter ... leading to whomever possesses such a collection of
data, to having an remarkably powerful influence in events.
It's not clear to me where all the data that's being accumulated is ending up;
particularly in light of my comments, above, regarding backups, database
replication issues, and the delivery of exported data and schemas to Oracle's
Technical Support staff.
There's no doubt that such a company, with such a product, is in a powerful
position, accumulating much information, and in a position to use it in many
different ways - as bargaining chips with United States government
agencies, but also with other governments' agencies, as well.
