This article in Vanity Fair will scare hell out of you and then enrage you. The idea that any detail of our lives is available to any politician, or person, willing to pay for it is scary as hell, and an invasion of privacy guaranteed to put you in the hypertension range in blood pressure.
Hello?? Has anyone seen the Constitution lately?? ANYONE??
Why bother with the Bill of Rights, who needs warrants, when you can just buy the info from your jolly local data miner!! HO HO HO!!
This is John Aristotle Phillips..He knows everything about you. And he sells the information to the Republican candidates.
He may also be selling it to others, but the focus in this article seems to be on the Republican candidates making use of data mining. Like this...
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.
So, they not only know all about YOU, they know all about the people you are connected to, personally and politically. Does anyone besides me see this as a tool for something other than political consultancy?? Oh, and he is a private company, not a data base put together by either party. Awkward phrasing, I know, but it says it best. This is what Richard Viguerie says,
Aristotle’s massive private database contains detailed information about roughly 175 million American voters. "It’s not that [Aristotle’s] list is good—they’re considered to have the only list," says Richard Viguerie, the venerable conservative strategist. "Aristotle is the premier company in that area. If you want to get into demographics, I don’t know that they even have a competitor."
And here is the weird part..the really weird part..the guy is a liberal..sort of..maybe..well, yeah. This is what sort of record he has..not at all the sort of person that you would think a data miner would be.
Aristotle was founded in 1983 by Phillips, a onetime aspiring aerospace engineer and liberal activist, and his younger brother, Dean, an M.I.T.-trained computer scientist.
snip..
The son of Greek immigrants, Phillips ran for Congress while still in his early 20s, and nearly won. His platform was anti-nuclear-proliferation, a cause he took up in the 1970s when, as a precocious undergraduate at Princeton University, he set out to design an atomic bomb—just to show how frighteningly easy it was. He published a memoir about the experience, Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid, and even got himself cast in a proposed TV movie based on it.
But for the past two decades Phillips has worked in the shadows, compiling his vast database. He likes to compare it to the Human Genome Project, which seems apt: both are marvels of technology that can yield impressive yet troubling results.
See what I mean when I say weird?? Oh, and he also owns a large similar database for the UK. So it's not just us that are being compiled into data and mined for anything the corporations can get. It's the Brits too! Read the whole article, it's fascinating, really scary, but fascinating. Like a mouse mesmerized by a snake.
So, read this, and then wonder the next time you talk to someone, or buy something, is Big Brother, Inc. watching?? Yeah, probably.