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China Oracle United States Technology

How Oracle Sells Repression in China (theintercept.com) 97

Posted by msmash from the tick-tock dept.
In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it's been marketing its own software for their surveillance work. From a report: Police in China's Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department's disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations. So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company's California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle's website, begin with a "case outline" listing four Oracle "product[s] used" by Liaoning police to "do criminal analysis and prediction." One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect.

Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create "security case heat map[s]." Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been "incomprehensible," more easily "trace the key people/objects/events" and "identify potential suspect[s]" -- which in China often means dissidents. Oracle representatives have marketed the company's data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a "client" in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents -- including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China's "Police Cloud," a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.
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How Oracle Sells Repression in China More

How Oracle Sells Repression in China

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  • If you expect morals from for-profit organizations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:03AM (#61075994)

    ...you're gonna have a bad time!

    • Really, business is business

    • They know that IBM/Dehomag got richer doing the same thing and told themselves "if *they* got away with this, why can't we, too?"
      • IBM sold technology to the N@zis leading to WWII. It was tech to help track all of the Jews they were interning. So these for profit tech companies will happily participate in human suffering and crime if there's a dollar in it. Wow... I broke Slashdot lameness filter....

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Seems like half the people commenting on this topic would be perfectly fine with that because what'dya expect they're a corporation and business is business. These guys are actually worse than politicians.

        • Corporations are the most efficient form of organization in human history. They have a purpose and a mission: to make money for the shareholders. They are governed by laws, not by morality. You can't abolish corporations and capitalism because that would cause an economic disaster like the one in the ex-SSSR. Corporations in SSSR weren't for profit. Have you ever tried a Russian car, like Lada Riva 1500? I have and I do prefer for profit cars like GM, VW, Toyota, Ford, BMW or Honda. You see, to make the "ev

    • I would suggest that you look at the original customer for Larry Ellison and why the database is called Oracle

  • Typical (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Oracle would sell it's own children if it turned a profit.

  • Don't feel bad if you were funding this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <`gameboyrmh' `at' `gmail.com'> on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:14AM (#61076060) Journal

    Paying for and using Oracle software is its own punishment.

    • Agreed that using Oracle's software is its own form of repression.

    • I am using Oracle database for the last few weeks, since the version 5.1.22 on VAX/VMS, and it seems pretty good to me. I am all open to comparisons with other databases, like MySQL (also an Oracle Corp. product) and PostgreSQL. BTW, Microsoft is also merrily selling SQL Server to Chinese. IBM is doing the same thing with DB2. Chinese government is also free to download PostgreSQL and Python and use it for their evil purposes. Is Guido van Rossum evil because he hasn't prevented the evil Chinese from using
    • You got that right! We use it every day, what a complete PITA!
  • Larry needs another boat. China's got that big boat money. It's a match made in heaven.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      What, is he bored flying his MIG around his private island in Hawaii already?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )
      The US market for creepy software has been tied up by Palantir. Oracle failed to sell to the CIA so they have to look for new markets. Maybe the govt should mandate that the CIA give a certain amount of business to Oracle in exchange for not selling to China.

  • Not related to tiktok (Score:4, Informative)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:29AM (#61076124)

    In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it's been marketing its own software for their surveillance work

    But this is not "instead". TikTok data has nothing to do with what this article is about. Please change "Instead" to "Meanwhile" or "At the same time" or similar.

  • Commies want CommieWare and somebody will end up providing it. So the question is, should we allow US firms to bid on such, or ban them from selling it, leaving the market to foreign firms?

    • Bingo. The question the authors should of posed and discussed. Instead, the whole piece reads like a SJW rant with basically everything being said bitterly obvious for anyone who understands "business ethics" or the lack thereof

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      So the question is, should we allow US firms to bid on such, or ban them

      Clinton (Mr.) gave China MFN status in the 90's and hell will freeze over before Biden Inc. takes it away, so you're question is moot. US companies will continue selling themselves out to China for the foreseeable future.

      Enjoy. You voted for it. Many times over many decades.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        It appears you didn't address the question. What should US policy be for such? It's clear you don't like the current policy, but it's good practice to have an alternative prepared before griping. Work 101.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tailhook ( 98486 )

          have an alternative

          There is no alternative; our Western establishment is bought and paid for by China. Nothing that happens during the remainder of your lifetime will run counter to Chinese prerogatives. They're conducting the official whitewash of COVID-19 on behalf of China as we 'speak.' No one is going to trouble China or Oracle about how they use software from US companies.

  • Selling the Chinese your software makes much better business sense that having them infringe on your intellectual property. I applaud Larry for his salesmanship!

    • Selling the Chinese your software makes much better business sense that having them infringe on your intellectual property. I applaud Larry for his salesmanship!

      Works great until China invents a "look a like" system that doesn't infringe Oracles patents. cough cough They will won't pay Larry's license fees for long.

    • 'Sell'? They'll just crack whatever licensing scheme is used to control copies of it, then copy it as many times as they want and not pay for it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Then they'll figure out what a clusterfuck of a system they've just stolen and dump it as the useless pile of outdated garbage that it is.

        I've been involved in a number of fairly large database projects over the years, two of them were Oracle and both were multi-year multi-million dollar fiascos. One was replaced by Informix and the other by SQL Server.

  • Paradox of progress (Score:3)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Thursday February 18, 2021 @12:48PM (#61076420)

    Criminals will use any tech available to them, including dark web, end to end encryption, ransomware, deepfakes, armed drones, even nukes/dirty bombs if they can get a hold of these. In general, we want police to win over criminals. Even in oppressive countries like China there are lots of common criminals and would be terrorists that we don't want to operate with impunity. And trying to keep tech out of hands of criminals doesn't work and hurts law abiding citizens and businesses that need same technology for benign reasons.

    So I don't see any way out of also giving police access to cutting edge tech - mining of publicly available and voluntarily provided data, surveillance and armed drones, jetpacks - to even out the odds. It's spooky and dangerous, but criminals are spooky and dangerous too.

    Maybe humankind can only survive through space exploration because we are too stupid and irresponsible to all be around each other. We can't resist developing dangerous stuff just because we can, or using it for crimes, or abusing authority to stop crimes.

    • It comes down to trust: We can't trust the Chinese government and Chinese LEOs. Would you hand a gun to someone you know you can't trust to not go around shooting up everything and everyone?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bongo ( 13261 )

      I think that is a sound argument.

      A problem is that if the government ends up having overwhelming power, then the smartest criminals will need to take over the government.

      In other words, if you don't want nasty dictators to get into power, don't give the government the kinds of powers which nasty dictators crave.

      And by nasty dictators I mean like those german guys which Indiana Jobes hates (Slashdot filter seems to not like their name).

  • How Oracle Sells Repression in China

    ... it's probably a line-item on their order forms -- priced per person.

    • You have apparently never worked for Oracle Corp. Oracle Corp. has always been VERY concerned with following all the applicable laws. In this case, there are none. BTW, did you know that the president's son got much richer by doing business with CCP? I wonder what did he sell?

  • ... a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

    Anyone remember Total Information Awareness: The USA plan to have police inspect everything online and be able to track a person's every breath? China's "police cloud" isn't different to what other countries are doing: For example, the US 'no fly' list. China is just labelling more people as "potential suspect[s]".

    ... four Oracle "product[s] used" ...

    One can be very confident that Oracle sold this to the US government first.

  • Yet another example of the american military financing another arsehole (Ellision) who will do anything for a dollar, human rights or not.
  • A capitalist company helping communist dictators repress their people to get rich. Who said capitalism and communism can't work together?

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