Stratfor

Audio readout of this profile.

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 40 in 2008, growing to approximately 100 by 2016) 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 February 2005 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 (Hammond arrested 5 March 2012; indictment unsealed 6 March 2012 in the Southern District of New York), ended with Hammond's 28 May 2013 plea to a single conspiracy count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and his subsequent ten-year federal-prison sentence on 15 November 2013.⁴

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, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the United Nations, and several US State governments — alongside the firm's subscriber database (approximately 860,000 active and inactive accounts on the Stratfor site, of which approximately 75,000 were paying 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 substantial subscriber-base reduction, 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 2012–2020 included:

• The June 2012 settlement of subscriber-class-action litigation arising from the credit-card disclosure (approximately $1.75 million in subscription credits and credit-monitoring services).
• Substantial reorganisation of the firm's internal IT infrastructure under successor Chief Information Officer hires.
• The 2015 Teakwood Capital growth-equity investment (approximately $12 million).
• The 4 February 2020 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, 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. Subscriber-class-action settlement reporting, June 2012 (approximately $1.75 million in subscription credits and credit-monitoring services); RANE press release, "RANE Acquires Stratfor," 4 February 2020.
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).