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There are corporate private investigators, companies doing very forensic background checks on people. They buy data, they get their own data... They don't want their industry publicised.

Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company's internal jargon.

Even the best data security systems can't protect private taxpayer information from entrepreneurial foreign businesses than can make huge profits selling U.S. taxpayer information.

We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.

In order to protect the market value of a proprietary database, the owner must prohibit redistribution of the contents - otherwise, the information would quickly leak out and be widely known.

Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.

What we've seen in government for so often is that people have been shady - about their roles, hiding things, not releasing things.

Oracle is obsessed with security. It's an absolute requirement for all our products. The real security issue is when customers take older products that were not built for the Internet, and kind of rack them and put them on the Internet.

Companies that receive government information demands have to obey the law, but they often have room for maneuver. They scarcely ever use it.

There's strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.