John Aristotle Phillips:
John Aristotle Phillips is a U.S. entrepreneur.
[edit] "A-Bomb Kid"
Philips was born in 1954 or 1955 to Greek immigrants .[1] In 1977, he became known as the A-Bomb Kid while attending Princeton University as a junior undergraduate when he designed a nuclear weapon using publicly-available books and papers.
Phillips was an underachieving student who played the tiger mascot at Princeton games. Hoping to stay at the school, he proposed a term paper for a seminar on nuclear proliferation outlining the design for an atomic bomb similar to the Nagasaki weapon. According to Phillips' supervisor Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist, and professor Harold Feiveson, who held the seminar, Phillips' design was not functional[1], and the story was widely circulated in exaggerated form. Nevertheless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation confiscated Phillips's term paper and a mock-up he had constructed in his dormitory room. Phillips published his story together with a co-author, David Michaelis, as Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid (ISBN 0-671-82731-6 / ISBN 0-688-03351-2).
[edit] Political activity
Phillips parlayed his celebrity into a brief career as an anti-nuclear activist. In 1980 and 1982 he ran for the United States House of Representatives as the Democratic Party candidate in the fourth congressional district of Connecticut, both times losing against Republican Stewart McKinney.
[edit] Aristotle, Inc.
The experience he had gained during his campaigns obtaining the voter list from the state and using it for campaign purposes led him and his brother Dean (who had written a program to handle the list on an Apple II) to found Aristotle, Inc. in 1983,[1] a non-partisan technology consulting firm for political campaigns which John Philips has since lead as the CEO. It specializes in enriching voter lists with personal data from other sources (such as income, gun ownership or church attendance) and data-mining, to assist with micro-targeting of specific voter groups; as of 2007, its database contained detailed information about ca. 175 million U.S. voters and it had about 100 employees.[1] Aristotle has served every occupant of the White House since Ronald Reagan, and consults for several top political action committees.[2]
As of 2007, Phillips lived in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.[1]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e James Verini: Big Brother Inc.. Vanity Fair online, December 13, 2007
- ^ Aristotle - Now You Know
[edit] External links
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