December 2007
by James Verini
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.
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. See Full Article
