“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.”

- “Big Brother Inc.,” Vanity Fair

I HAVEN’T held a lot of positions. But every position I have ever held or was offered was the result of the perception that I either possessed a large knowledge base concerning a subject or that I had the ability to access such information. Knowledge is power, as we have heard so many times. And with this political season reaching its inevitable point of contention and bickering and in-fighting for the allegiance of particular voting blocks, undoubtedly the three campaigns still in the game, are using political data mining firms to cull valuable and exploitable information to advance their cause. One man at the center of these services is John Aristotle Phillips, CEO of Aristotle Inc., a firm that sells political and individual voter intelligence, that are the result of years and years of mining. Think: Big Brother in 1984. As excerpts from a Web-exclusive Vanity Fair article published December 13, 2007 state:

“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.

Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith’s basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more.

This is how information once considered personal moves in the brave new world of 21st-century campaigning. In this world, thanks to a handful of shadowy high-tech firms such as Aristotle, politicians often know more about you than you do about them. If you vote or donate to candidates or causes, chances are that campaign strategists working for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, or Mitt Romney—or all of them—have you profiled already.”

Read more of Vanity Fair’s “Big Brother Inc.” [Here]