Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison was seen expressing the enthusiastic support for the NSA’s global surveillance of the worldwide web and everyone on it. Ellison claimed that some things said about the NSA were misleading – for example, information was already being collected long before the agency was seeing it. Moreover, such organizations as credit card companies had all this information long before the National Security Agency.
However, it is obvious that there is some difference between a credit card company building a file on its customer and the most powerful government of the world potentially keeping records on everyone. For instance, credit card companies normally have no power to arrest people and lock them up in solitary for a lifetime. The critics also can’t think of a single time a failed card application confiscated someone’s passport.
Larry Ellison claimed that he has never heard of data being misused by the government. Perhaps, he has never heard of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where the Fourth Amendment protections of a US citizen were violated at least once. Via collusion with other allies, including the UK, the US can get around irritating technicalities like Amendment protections – as such, in all likelihood it was many more.
In the meanwhile, the NSA is not transparent at all, and most details about the spying programs are classified for “national security” and therefore would have never been revealed if not for Edward Snowden. Still, Larry Ellison believes that surveillance is essential, citing the need to minimize terror attacks like in Boston. He misses the fact that the blanket surveillance of citizens failed to stop that tragedy from happening, with the FBI admitting that snooping couldn’t have flagged the Boston bombers.
Although Ellison admitted he was a bit concerned about the possibility of the technology being used for political targeting rather than terrorism, he insisted that the government would never do so. Perhaps, he is so supportive of the spying program simply because Oracle is a top tech supplier for the NSA. Aside from the NSA, the company also solicits other defense contracts and recently signed a $680 million deal with the Defense Information Systems Agency, for example.
