Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s bold prediction of AI-powered surveillance dystopia: ‘Citizens on best behaviour’
He’s the tech billionaire who’s jostling with Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man. And he’s outlined his vision for an AI surveillance dystopia.
He toppled Elon Musk as the world’s richest man. Will he try for the title of most extreme tech CEO next?
Larry Ellison may have been the world’s lowest-profile billionaire in recent decades. But that doesn’t mean he’s backward about coming forward.
“Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we’re constantly recording everything that’s going on,” he told a tightly choreographed Oracle event last year.
It sounds Orwellian.
But was the world of the famous novel 1984 really a dystopia?
The 81-year-old tech and media mogul is a major backer of US President Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. He’s donated to supporting election campaigns. And he even joined Trump’s insiders attempting to discredit the 2020 Presidential election result.
Now, the stakes have risen.
Ellison’s Oracle technology services company runs the enormous data centres many big-name companies and governments use. It has been awarded hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Trump Administration contracts. And the White House appears poised to give him control of America’s most popular (and China’s most invasive) social media platform - TikTok.
All at a time President Trump wants action.
In the wake of the assassination of Christian Nationalist Charles Kirk on September 10, the 47th President has ordered all government agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” any operations conducted in the name of anti-fascism.
Antifa under the bed
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump complained to Truth Social about Democrat opposition to his policies.
“They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
“For many years, Democrat politicians have tried to downplay ANTIFA’s reign of terror and looked the other way while left-wing violence plagued American communities, just like these so-called ‘experts’ are doing now,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson later added.
“No more. At President Trump’s direction, the entire federal government will work together to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all illegal operations conducted by ANTIFA.”
Trump’s making this possible.
The 79-year-old former reality TV host and real estate developer last week issued yet another Executive Order, this one titled: “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organised Political Violence”.
And legal and civil rights experts are sounding alarm bells.
It’s about what this means for the Department of Justice. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“(J. Edgar) Hoover, director until his death in 1972, operated a secret FBI within the FBI that he used to destroy people and organisations whose political opinions he opposed,” notes San Francisco State University Professor Emeritus Betty Medsger.
She warns history may be about to rhyme.
“Director Kash Patel has conducted a political purge, firing the highest officials at the bureau and thousands of FBI agents who investigated alleged crimes by Trump as well as investigated participants in the January 6, 2021, US Capitol riots,” she writes.
“It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has targeted massive numbers of people perceived to be political enemies.”
Now Trump is demanding “a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organisations” that are seeking to “change or direct policy outcomes.”. And he wants pre-emptive action, with agitators being arrested “before they result in violent political acts”.
Ellison is ideally positioned to help.
And he may even be eager to do so.
Both want a world where you have no choice but to behave - because they’re watching you. All the time. Everywhere.
Oracle - the all-seeing eye
“We completely redesigned (police) body cameras,” Ellison told financial analysts in September last year. He was selling his vision of an artificial-intelligence-enhanced future.
“We transmit the video back to headquarters. And AI is constantly monitoring the video.”
Oracle’s founder didn’t shirk the obvious implications.
“You turn it off when you go to the bathroom ... The truth is, we don’t really turn it off,” he admitted. “What we do is we record it so no one can see it, but no one can get into that recording without a court order. So you get the privacy you requested.”
Mobile phones and laptops all carry cameras and microphones that can be activated without the user’s knowledge. And these now come standard on most modern televisions, personal assistants, cars, and doorbells …
All this data is transmitted back to a data centre. It’s recorded. It’s inspected.
But Ellison reassured the financial analysts that his intentions are noble.
“I’m going to lunch with my friends … We won’t listen in unless there’s a court order,” he insisted.
“It’s unimpeachable. AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person, whether it’s the sheriff or the chief or whomever we need to take control of the situation.”
But the Ellison family has cornered the data market.
They dominate data in the same way the Rockefeller family dominated oil. As the Vanderbilt family governed the US railways.
It provides the physical computing centres and governing software that global corporations, governments, militaries, and police rely upon. Their data is stored by Oracle. And scrutinised by Oracle.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s political miscalculations have significantly impacted his personal wealth. But Ellison’s run of Trump Administration contracts has helped propel his fortune to some $US393 billion, briefly earning him the title of world’s richest man.
With wealth comes power.
But Ellison’s real power is at his fingertips.
Your data.
Your social media profiles. Your business records. Your medical history. Your private photos. Your stored emails, texts, and SMS messages. The personal telemetry collected by a multitude of forgotten sensors (phone accelerometers can, for example, distinguish between riding a scooter and a pushbike).
Oracle now gets to redesign and restructure everything about TikTok. It already hosts TikTok’s data on its servers for years. Now it gets control of the algorithms that serve, direct and scrape one of the most popular video-sharing social media services in the world.
“This deal will allow for the US to control the app’s algorithm,” Vice President James Vance told media when the takeover of the Chinese-owned company was announced. “It’s actually going to be American-operated all the way.”
Antifa outlawed
“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” Trump’s domestic terrorism executive order reads.
But is holding non-MAGA opinions a crime?
“Americanism” is most definitely in the eye of the beholder,” Cato Institute fellow Pat Eddington argues.
“Lots of people are opposed to capitalism (wrongly, in my view), but that is most definitely not a federal crime. Neither is being ‘anti-Christianity’ for that matter. And it’s primarily fans of The Turner Diaries and sovereign citizen types that want to violently overthrow the federal government. I could go on, but you probably get the point.”
There’s another issue.
Antifa doesn’t exist as an organisation.
Anti-fascism is a political ideology. Like feminism. Environmentalism. Christian nationalism.
And personal ideology is supposed to be protected in the US by the First Amendment.
Postwar President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835 found a way around this in 1947.
It sought to secure loyalty among his federal employees. It was all about the struggle against Communism. Of protecting “American values”.
“People could be denied federal jobs, or existing federal employees could be fired if an unelected and unaccountable ‘loyalty’ board determined that the applicant or worker had simply associated with the wrong people,” Eddington explains.
“I raise this historical example because …, President Donald Trump issued a Presidential National Security Memorandum that makes Truman’s look tame by comparison.”
The Hoover effect
“So there’s a huge amount they can do without ever having to go before a federal judge to get authorisation for it when they’re doing it as an assessment,” Eddington warns. “With a complete loyalist like [Attorney General] Pam Bondi in charge over at the Department of Justice, you can be sure that this is going to be treated with absolute seriousness.”
Eddington believes Trump’s executive order offers a plausible justification for federal agents to target political opponents. It can be argued to convey “authorised purpose” - a power that grants federal agents and investigators the ability to bypass “probable cause” requirements.
This makes it easier to recruit informants, interrogate suspects - and search databases.
Such searches can be conducted quickly and comprehensively by a complicit AI.
Ellison appears onboard with the concept.
And Trump, like Truman, has his J. Edgar Hoover.
Professor Emeritus Medsger believes Director Patel’s FBI is poised to act.
“This isn’t the first time an FBI director has been driven by a desire to suppress the rights of people perceived to be political enemies,” she argues. “Hoover, director until his death in 1972, operated a secret FBI within the FBI that he used to destroy people and organisations whose political opinions he opposed.”
Hoover had ordered his agents to “enhance paranoia” among political activists.
Vietnam War opponents were placed under FBI surveillance.
Hundreds of agents were assigned to sift through the private letters and documents of 5365 University of Berkeley staff in search of information revealing “illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking, other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability.”
Such a search would be a snap for Oracle’s Surveillance AI.
Professor Medsger fears the US Constitution, laws, and decades of precedents are proving powerless..
“The recent statements from both Trump and top aide Miller suggest the FBI’s independence, and broader constitutional requirements that the administration remain faithful to the law, are meaningless to them,” she concludes. “They suggest that, like Hoover, they would criminalise dissent.”
Originally published as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s bold prediction of AI-powered surveillance dystopia: ‘Citizens on best behaviour’
