The Oracle headquarters, once located in Redwood Shores, Calif.
Chinese Communist Party security forces have been using software made by U.S. technology company Oracle to monitor and detect local populations, according to a new report in the online U.S. media outlet The Intercept. In its bid to buy TikTok (the overseas version of Jitterbug), Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed on to the Chinese Communist Party’s police. Instead, it has been marketing its own software for the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance efforts.
Reports say Oracle’s products are used by several Chinese Communist Party law enforcement agencies to analyze big data and to help monitor and track citizens. One place where Oracle’s security services are allegedly being used is Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist government has detained an unknown number of Uighur Muslims and is committing what the U.S. government considers a genocide.
A slide posted on Oracle’s website lists four products apparently used by police in Liaoning province for “crime analysis and prediction. The slide presentation, reportedly presented at Oracle’s California headquarters in 2018, outlines how Liaoning police use Oracle’s platform to sift through large amounts of data to “identify potential suspects.”
In at least two cases, the documents suggest that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is a slide story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document that describes police in Shaanxi province as a “customer” in need of an intelligence platform. According to the documents, Oracle also boasts that its data security services are used by other Communist Party police entities.
In its marketing materials, Oracle says its software can help police use information such as online reviews, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases and images from facial recognition. Oracle’s presentation even suggested that police could use its product to combine social media activity, with a special database from the Chinese Communist government, to track drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted the company’s technology for the Communist Party’s “police cloud,” a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.
Oracle spokeswoman Jessica Moore told The Intercept that the presentations were theoretical and that all of the company’s transactions in China were in full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions.
However, while Moore denied that the company’s technology was indeed used by Chinese Communist Party security forces, as described in the slides, former Oracle senior director Xavier Lopez told a different story.
Lopez told The Intercept, “The Chinese Communist Party police used the software and the data did not come from us. The data came from that province. The Liaoning province used the software, and they licensed it for different things, for different situations. And this is one example of them using it for that particular situation.”
The report also said that Oracle targeted some of its marketing materials at CCP military actors, although it is unclear whether any CCP military entities use Oracle’s products. Oracle allegedly produced several Chinese marketing presentations targeting the CCP military, as well as other CCP national security entities.
According to The Intercept, the company marketed itself as a “U.S. team” and boasted that it had contracts with all five branches of the U.S. military. It has recent or upcoming agreements with NASA, the CIA and several U.S. police departments. Co-founder Larry Ellison, told Fox Business in 2018 that “I’m on Team America” in the race between the U.S. and China.
Oracle has used its successful partnerships with U.S. military companies to market its services to Chinese customers, according to the report. At least one presentation cited Oracle’s U.S. defense work in an attempt to win a Chinese Cloud Computing contract.
Experts say the use of big data has been a key part of Beijing‘s repressive security strategy. Communist Party leaders have reportedly put a priority on preventive security, with Xi describing the need to prevent unexpected “black swan” events that could destabilize the country.
Edward Schwarck, a doctoral student at Oxford University and a researcher on Chinese policing, told The Intercept, “The logic is that it’s no longer enough to react to events because by then it’s too late.”
Daniel Sprick, a China law expert at the University of Cologne, told The Intercept, “Everyone is using cell phones, using WeChat, using all these devices that can be tracked, and that can generate a lot of data points. “
Oracle has been marketing its products to China for these purposes since at least 2010, according to the report. A Chinese language presentation from Oracle says Oracle can provide “a more complete platform to meet the needs of public security big data processing.
Perhaps most concerning is the company’s work in Xinjiang. A publicly available list of Oracle customers lists Xinjiang’s public security department as the recipient of a “data security solution. Moore admitted to The Intercept that Oracle had “limited licensing deals” with the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau between 2011 and 2019. The Uighur genocide in the province has been publicly known in some form since at least 2017.
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