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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Big Brother Inc.
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Dec 17, 2007 01:22pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Thursday, December 13, 2007 07:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company’s shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet.
by James Verini WEB EXCLUSIVE December 13, 2007
In Washington, D.C., power often resides in faceless corners. Consider Aristotle Inc., whose offices occupy a nondescript town house on Pennsylvania Avenue, just out of view of the Capitol Building. On a warm fall morning during the last congressional-campaign season, I find myself in a conference room there as Aristotle’s founder and C.E.O., John Aristotle Phillips, shows off his latest innovation. Phillips is in the business of political data mining—he finds out everything he can about individual voters and then sells that information to politicians—and the tool he’s demonstrating for me could be seen as a breakthrough in electoral politics, or a new low in privacy invasion, depending on your perspective. The culmination of nearly a quarter-century of digging up information on tens of millions of Americans, it’s called Aristotle 360. The best way to think of it is as a hal2000 for running campaigns.
“What we do is help a campaign run more and more like an effective business,” Phillips says as he types on his laptop, bringing up on a large projection screen the profile of an actual voter in Atlanta, whom we’ll call John Smith. |
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