Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Privacy is already gone.” Our lives are at risk, not our liberties, the Silicon Valley software leader argued. It wasn’t an uncommon view in the Valley; Ellison was echoing what Sun’s Scott McNealy had been saying for years. Oracle didn’t win its proposed state-information monopoly, but it did get a lot of contracts, including one to unify all the DOD’s civilian personnel databases and another to work with Lockheed Martin on an (optional) iris-scanning system. Oracle’s revenue doubled during the Bush years.