Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Receives Top Secret Clearance for Intelligence Community

Oracle announced on August 15, 2023, that its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) received authority to operate Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) from the 18-agency Intelligence Community, marking a major expansion of Oracle’s access to the nation’s most classified systems. This clearance authorization enables Oracle to host and process the highest levels of classified intelligence data across all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA, and other members of the intelligence community.

Oracle had previously obtained Department of Defense authorization for TS/SCI and Special Access Program (SAP) missions in February 2022, but the August 2023 clearance extends this capability across the entire Intelligence Community. Oracle plans to offer 50 cloud services initially through its “Oracle National Security Regions”—highly secured, air-gapped operations centers connected exclusively to classified U.S. government networks and physically isolated from Oracle’s commercial cloud infrastructure.

This top-secret clearance positions Oracle to compete for classified workloads under two massive government contracts: the Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) and the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, both valued at multiple billions of dollars. Oracle now joins Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google as approved providers capable of handling the intelligence community’s most sensitive classified operations at all security levels.

The expansion of Oracle’s security clearances to the highest classification levels deepens the company’s integration into the permanent infrastructure of the U.S. surveillance state. Oracle’s dual role as both a commercial data broker operating a “worldwide surveillance machine” (as alleged in the 2022 class action lawsuit) and a top-secret intelligence community cloud provider creates concerning possibilities for convergence between commercial and government surveillance capabilities. The company founded on a CIA contract in 1977 has now achieved comprehensive access to host the intelligence community’s most sensitive classified information and operations.

This clearance exemplifies the privatization of intelligence infrastructure, where commercial corporations gain access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets and surveillance capabilities. Oracle’s position raises questions about corporate control over classified government data, potential conflicts between profit motives and national security, and the blurred boundaries between state intelligence operations and private sector surveillance capitalism.