Larry Ellison surveillance comments

yazan Tim Official: Larry Ellison

So the guy who built the database that powers half the AI boom got his start with a CIA contract, and he's been pretty open about where he thinks this is all going. Larry Ellison told his investors that constant recording and reporting would keep citizens on their best behavior, his words: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on." Back in the 1970s, the CIA wanted a system to handle massive amounts of intelligence data, and the project was code-named Oracle. Ellison, then a college dropout in his early thirties, worked on it at Ampex. In 1977, he co-founded a company with Bob Miner and Ed Oates, naming it after that contract, and the CIA became their first customer. Fast forward to now: Ellison's worth $200.2 billion, the seventh richest person globally, and still owns about 40% of Oracle. He even brought in David Carney, the CIA's former executive director, as senior VP for global technology. At a September 2024 financial analyst meeting, Ellison pitched police body cameras that record nonstop with no officer control, drones replacing cop cars in chases, and AI automatically flagging issues. Nobody blinked, because he was talking to shareholders. Meanwhile, a 2022 class action accused Oracle of building dossiers on roughly 5 billion people, browsing history, movements, the works, and Oracle settled in 2024 for $115 million without admitting wrongdoing, leaving the systems intact. Most folks don't realize Oracle collects anything because it doesn't sell to consumers; it sells to hospitals, payroll departments, employers, and governments. And here's the kicker: while everyone's focused on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Oracle quietly became the infrastructure landlord. OpenAI signed a deal to buy $300 billion of computing from Oracle, and Oracle's backlog is $638 billion. They spent about $55.7 billion on capacity in 2026, largely debt-funded, and hold US defense cloud contracts alongside Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. So a big chunk of AI compute runs through a company born from intelligence work, led by a guy who's already told shareholders his vision. Sure, other clouds have defense deals, and Ellison frames it as crime prevention, not a police state. Plus, Oracle's stock is down ~30% from a year ago, so the market isn't convinced. But the pattern's been consistent for 49 years: government contract → company → same name → hired the agency's #3 → built the data machine → settled the lawsuit → now rents the infrastructure to everyone building AI. The guy selling the shovels already told you where this ends, he called it an opportunity. What do you think? #LarryEllison