Stratfor

Background

Strategic Forecasting, Inc. was founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas, by George Friedman, a political scientist who had previously held academic positions at Dickinson College and at the Center for Geopolitical Studies at Louisiana State University. Friedman's pre-Stratfor academic work — principally The Future of War (Crown, 1996, with Meredith Friedman) and the antecedent essays in The American National Interest — had developed a distinctive methodological framework that would subsequently shape Stratfor's analytical output: an emphasis on geographic determinism as the principal explanatory variable in long-term strategic outcomes; substantial scepticism toward intelligence-collection-based assessment of strategic intent; and a balance-of-power analytical framework that drew explicitly on the realist tradition of Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger.¹

The firm's institutional model across the post-1996 period was the production of subscription-based geopolitical analysis at scale. Subscribers (corporate, government, and individual) received daily and weekly analytical products organised around regional and thematic desks; the firm's analyst staff (approximately 50–80 across the post-2000 period) produced the analytical product on the basis of open-source research, the firm's network of in-country sources (the institutional adequacy of which was substantively questioned in the post-2012 published emails), and Friedman's strategic framework. The firm's principal product line was the Stratfor Intelligence Brief and its successor Stratfor Geopolitical Diary, with subsequent expansion into book-length forecasts (Friedman's The Next 100 Years, 2009; The Next Decade, 2011; and successive titles) that generalised the firm's analytical framework for popular-market consumption.²

The 2011 intrusion

The firm's principal documented operational event was the December 2011 intrusion into its computer systems by the Anonymous-affiliated AntiSec collective. The intrusion exfiltrated:

• Approximately five million internal Stratfor emails covering the period from July 2004 through December 2011.
• The firm's subscriber database, including approximately 860,000 active and inactive accounts.
• The firm's billing system, including substantial credit-card data on a subset of the subscriber base (which AntiSec subsequently used for unauthorised charitable donations).
• The firm's internal source-management database, which included substantial documentation on the firm's analytical-source network.³

The intrusion was conducted by a group of AntiSec contributors including Jeremy Hammond, an activist and computer-security researcher who had previously been involved in the 2004 Protest Warrior intrusion. Hammond was identified as a participant in the Stratfor intrusion through the cooperation of fellow AntiSec member Hector Xavier Monsegur (Sabu), who had been arrested by the FBI in June 2011 and was operating as a federal informant during the period of the Stratfor intrusion. The FBI's United States v. Hammond prosecution, which opened in March 2012, ended with Hammond's November 2013 plea to a single count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and his subsequent ten-year federal-prison sentence.⁴

The exfiltrated material was provided by the AntiSec contributors to WikiLeaks, which began publishing the "Global Intelligence Files" — the full corpus of approximately five million Stratfor emails — on 27 February 2012. The publication continued in stages across 2012–2013. The published material disclosed:

• The firm's client list, including the US Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the US Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the United Nations, several US State governments, and approximately 850,000 individual and corporate subscribers.
• Substantial internal correspondence on the firm's analytical practices, including substantively critical commentary by senior Stratfor analysts on the institutional quality of the firm's source network.
• Documentation of the firm's parallel commercial-intelligence service — distinct from the subscription analytical product — under which the firm undertook bespoke investigative work for corporate clients on activist groups, including documented work for Dow Chemical on the Bhopal Survivors' Movement and for Coca-Cola on the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
• The firm's internal pricing structure, including the substantial discount given to government subscribers relative to corporate subscribers at comparable subscription tiers.⁵

Institutional aftermath

The 2011 intrusion and the subsequent 2012–2013 disclosure produced substantial institutional consequences for the firm. The immediate operational impact included a substantial subscriber-base reduction (in the 30–40% range across 2012), substantial reputational damage particularly with respect to the firm's data-security practices, and substantial legal exposure on the question of whether the firm had complied with applicable data-protection obligations on the compromised subscriber data.⁶

The firm's institutional response across 2012–2014 included:

• A January 2013 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission on the data-security failures that had enabled the intrusion.
• Substantial reorganisation of the firm's internal IT infrastructure under successor Chief Information Officer hires.
• The 2013 settlement of subscriber-class-action litigation arising from the credit-card disclosure.
• The 2015 acquisition of the firm by the Risk Assistance Network + Exchange (RANE), a corporate risk-intelligence platform under which Stratfor has subsequently operated as a subsidiary brand.⁷

George Friedman departed Stratfor in May 2015, shortly after the RANE acquisition, and subsequently founded Geopolitical Futures, an independent geopolitical-analysis firm operating on substantially the same subscription-analytical model as Stratfor's original institutional design. Geopolitical Futures has continued to operate across the post-2015 period as the substantive successor to Friedman's original Stratfor institutional vision.⁸

Sources and further reading

1. George Friedman and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the 21st Century (Crown, 1996); George Friedman, America's Secret War (Doubleday, 2004); George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (Doubleday, 2009).
2. Stratfor Intelligence Brief and Geopolitical Diary archives (subscriber-only, partial reproduction in the post-2012 WikiLeaks Global Intelligence Files release); Friedman, The Next Decade (Doubleday, 2011) and successive titles.
3. FBI investigation case file on the Stratfor intrusion (partial FOIA releases); United States v. Hammond, US District Court for the Southern District of New York, 1:12-cr-00185.
4. United States v. Hammond, op. cit.; Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information (Dutton, 2012); Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency (Little, Brown, 2012).
5. WikiLeaks, The Global Intelligence Files — Stratfor emails archive, published from 27 February 2012; subsequent journalistic reconstruction in The Guardian, McClatchy, Rolling Stone, and Forbes of selected email content across 2012–2013.
6. Stratfor public statements on the 2011 intrusion and 2012 subscriber-base impact; subsequent industry reporting on the firm's institutional trajectory across 2012–2015.
7. Federal Trade Commission, "Stratfor Publishing LLC, Formerly Known as Strategic Forecasting, Inc., Settles FTC Charges It Failed to Protect Customer Data," March 2015 settlement; RANE press release, "RANE Acquires Stratfor," September 2015.
8. George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures (founded 2015) — successive analytical publications; Friedman, The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond (Doubleday, 2020).