John Aristotle Phillips (born August 23, 1955) is a U.S. entrepreneur specializing in political campaigns. Phillips first became famous in the 1970s for writing a term paper on how to design a nuclear bomb based solely on publicly available information. He was dubbed the A-Bomb Kid by the media and became a minor celebrity. Phillips is also the co-founder of Aristotle, Inc. (a non-partisan technology consulting firm for political campaigns) and PredictIt (a New Zealand-based online prediction market that offers exchanges on political and financial events).
"A-Bomb Kid"
John Aristotle Phillips was born in August 1955 to a family of Greek immigrants. He grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, with his brother Dean. John's father was a professor of engineering at Yale University, and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1973, Phillips enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, but two years later he transferred to Princeton University.
For his junior-year independent research project for his physics degree, Phillips decided that he wanted to try and prove Taylor's thesis correct, in the sense that anyone could design a plausible nuclear weapon based on information in the public domain. As he later wrote:
The physicist Freeman Dyson agreed to be his advisor of the paper, but told Phillips that he would give him no classified information. Phillips relied upon first-principles derivations of the physics of nuclear weapons, information obtained from declassified books and reports (including the Los Alamos Primer), and information obtained from making phone calls to contractors and chemical companies under false pretenses, in order to work out the specifications for a crude plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapon and the mathematics required to show it was plausible. The final paper, "The Fundamentals of Atomic Bomb Design: An Assessment of the Problems and Possibilities Confronting a Terrorist Group or Non-Nuclear National Attempting to Design a Crude Pu239 Fission Bomb," was turned in by Phillips in May 1976. Dyson gave it an "A". He also removed it from circulation. Contrary to many hyperbolic stories of this event, the paper was never seized by the US government or the FBI.
Another student in the course told a reporter at the Trenton Times about Phillips paper. Phillips was advised by Taylor, who then worked at Princeton, that going "public" with his story might help avert the sale of a nuclear reactor to Pakistan from France, which Taylor thought would be a good idea given the proliferation potential of such a sale. Phillips agreed to be the subject of the story. The story ended up being syndicated and re-written by national newspapers, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In many of these stories, the original intent of Phillips — to show that there were really no "nuclear secrets" — was overlooked. Instead, they focused on how Phillips had acquired the "secrets", and some even implied that he had built, and not just designed, a weapon. Senator William Proxmire later used the incident to embarrass the French government, which was preparing to sell "peaceful" nuclear technology to Pakistan. and making a series of television appearances including a featured spot on the game show To Tell the Truth.
Aristotle, Inc.
In 1998 Phillips spoke of the critical importance to a political campaign of targeting its advertising, including on the World Wide Web. In 2009 he observed that 8.9% of registered voters in the United States are ineligible to vote because they have moved away or died.
The experience he had gained during his campaigns obtaining the voter list from the state and using it for campaign purposes led John Phillips and his brother Dean (who had written a program to handle the list on an Apple II) to found Aristotle, Inc. in 1983, It specializes in combining voter lists with personal data from other sources (such as income, gun ownership or church attendance) and data-mining, to assist with microtargeting 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.
As Justin Thomas from Vanity Fair put it, Aristotle "could be seen as a breakthrough in electoral politics, or a new low in privacy invasion, depending on your perspective."
In May 1987, Campaigns & Elections (C&E) magazine reviewed Campaign Manager, Aristotle's software. According to the case files, Phillips learned in advance that the review contained negative comments, which he believed to be false. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the editors to make changes to the article, he concluded that the negative review was prompted by his earlier removal of Aristotle's advertisement from the magazine and by the personal dislike of publisher James Dwinell. According to Phillips, during their first meeting, Dwinell called him "a sleazy guy." A few weeks after the review was published, Phillips launched a rival publication, Campaign Industry News, and filed a lawsuit against C&E. A year and a half later, Dwinell settled the dispute with Phillips, paying him his legal fees and $100,000 in cash, most of which Phillips immediately invested in Campaign Industry News. In 1993, when Dwinell sold C&E to Ron Faucheux, Phillips made a deal with Faucheux under which he ceased publication of Campaign Industry News and transferred its subscribers to C&E. In exchange, Faucheux gave Phillips a moderate amount of cash and several years of free advertising for Aristotle.
Personal life
As of 2007, Phillips lived in San Francisco with his wife Patty, a former Wilhelmina model and currently an art school teacher, and daughter.