Oracle Hires CIA Executive Director David Carney, Establishes Information Assurance Center

Oracle Corporation hired David W. Carney as Vice President of Information Assurance on September 4, 2001, just one week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, marking a significant deepening of Oracle’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community. Carney retired after 32 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as Executive Director—the agency’s Chief Operating Officer and third-ranking position—before joining Oracle to head its newly established Information Assurance Center.

The Information Assurance Center was founded in November 2001, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, to focus on security and homeland defense applications of Oracle’s technology. Carney’s hiring represented a classic example of the revolving door between intelligence agencies and their corporate contractors, with the CIA’s former #3 official moving directly into a senior position at a company that had been a CIA contractor since its founding in 1977 and held major database contracts across the intelligence community.

Carney reportedly stated that “in some ways, 9/11 made business a bit easier,” reflecting how the post-9/11 expansion of national security spending and surveillance programs created lucrative opportunities for Oracle and other intelligence contractors. The establishment of the Information Assurance Center positioned Oracle to capitalize on the massive expansion of homeland security and intelligence budgets that followed the attacks, offering database and security solutions for the rapidly growing surveillance apparatus.

The timing of Carney’s hiring—literally days before 9/11—and the immediate establishment of a dedicated Information Assurance Center demonstrated Oracle’s strategic positioning to exploit the post-attack security environment. Carney’s extensive CIA networks and insider knowledge of intelligence community needs provided Oracle with invaluable access and credibility when competing for sensitive government contracts in the expanding national security market.

This revolving door arrangement exemplified how intelligence agencies and their contractors maintain intertwined leadership, with senior officials transitioning seamlessly between government surveillance roles and private sector positions that profit from government surveillance contracts. Carney’s move from CIA Executive Director to Oracle Vice President illustrated the blurred boundaries between public intelligence operations and private corporate interests, where the same individuals design government surveillance programs and then profit from implementing those programs through commercial contracts.