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" I mean interesting as in "lied to the public about an issue of global importance."" It's so secret multiple HN readers have said they subscribed. It's so exc

" I mean interesting as in "lied to the public about an issue of global importance."" It's so secret multiple HN readers have said they subscribed. It's so exclusive that anyone can subscribe for a yearly price that is cheaper than cable TV, let alone secret publications like "Science" or "Nature". You really seem to have the wrong end of the stick here, as in not-clear-on-the-concept of how Stratfor worked. If you want to know if someone has "lied to the public about an issue of global importance", and think Stratfor holds the answer, you would subscribe to Stratfor and compare what Stratfor reported to what the public figure claimed. You've bought into some kind of radical left fantasy of what Stratfor does, turning it into the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. "Any entity that needs Stratfor's analysis of global events and decisions seems like a reasonable candidate to deliver an important payload in such a leak." See above about the Bilderbergers. Say you're a company doing business with Turkey. Not a huge business, but you've got a lot riding on stability in Turkey. Maybe you import rugs. Maybe you do package tours of Istanbul. Maybe you have a team of developers there. Where do you go for good analysis of the situation there, given the history of military takeovers and whatnot? The newspapers only cover it occasionally, probably too late to do you much good. MSNBC won't cover it at all on a weekend. FOX News would be all "OMG, Turkish Muslims! Threat or Menace?" and be useless. Turkish media might cover it, but not provide good analysis, and you don't know if the coverage is biased there, or if so, how. So where do you turn? You could read the Economist, but that might not be good enough. Maybe you could buy some reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit, or Jane's. Or you could subscribe to Stratfor, which is probably cheaper.

danilocampos 15y ago
> You've bought into some kind of radical left fantasy And you've gone to the zoo, friend. Almost to the point where I wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse to troll me. (Nice one, if so.) Two things to note, here. 1. Stratfor has public products and private analysis services. 2. I'm not talking about what they've disclosed publicly. You could substitute "Stratfor" with "The New York Times Company" in this scenario and I would take the same position. Papers rarely publish all they know, as sometimes it's a better bet to keep quiet on something juicy to avoid burning bridges. Papers are also routinely asked to sit on a story, or bury it outright, as a favor in exchange for access. A leak of all New York Times emails would probably include a lot of the same sort of content and people I'm imagining in a Stratfor leak. The SNR wouldn't be nearly as favorable, since the Times has a much more public profile and a much broader scope than just global events. Stratfor's specific focus makes it much likelier that any given source, or any given chum of the CEO, has said something via email that could be pretty powerful, were it disclosed. I'd also wager that Stratfor content will be more candid, since it's a smaller world than mass market newspaper publishing.
- jessedhillon 15y ago
  It's a sad fact of subjectivity that you can, apparently seiously, call out anyone else for trolling. You've run every fallacious argument up the flagpole here. But it's the fault of jonhenry or any rational person for taking this issue up with you, since you admitted squarely in the beginning that your intellectual justification for this is "fuck it." The only thing preventing my using this line to justify the publication of internal emails between the 5 people who run my competitor is a thin, grey line that you seem to be drawing and redrawing continually. This is an intellectually and morally bankrupt idea you've got here, it hardly suffices for a proper argument as to why this is legitimate action.
- forensic 15y ago
  Nobody important uses the analysis service. Everyone important uses the CIA. Stratfor serves small and medium sized businesses with global operations. Huge military-industrial operations like Halliburton get their intelligence from the CIA. You don't know what Stratfor is. It's a niche news product, nothing more. Like any newspaper, they have secret sources. But the news product and analysis services offered by Stratfor are extremely benign. Anon is targeting them for no other reason than that Stratfor is a small business who hired a shitty engineering firm with bad security practices. Any script kiddie can go around finding non-technical businesses with poor security. Stratfor's 70-person staff is peopled entirely by nerdy writers with humanities degrees who spend all day compiling mostly-public information released by the world's parliament buildings and militaries. Stratfor deals in the analysis of public information for the benefit for private parties. No government agency relies on them, though they may subscribe, Stratfor will not be their primary source. The people who rely on Stratfor are companies too small and inconsequential to get CIA-access. Anyway I support the mission of Anonymous to hack the government and hack evil big corporations but Stratfor is not part of that complex and no juicy information is going to come out of this leak. It's going to be extremely mundane stuff and will probably get a few innocent cab drivers in 3rd world countries murdered.

danilocampos 15y ago

> You've bought into some kind of radical left fantasy And you've gone to the zoo, friend. Almost to the point where I wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse to troll me. (Nice one, if so.) Two things to note, here. 1. Stratfor has public products and private analysis services. 2. I'm not talking about what they've disclosed publicly. You could substitute "Stratfor" with "The New York Times Company" in this scenario and I would take the same position. Papers rarely publish all they know, as sometimes it's a better bet to keep quiet on something juicy to avoid burning bridges. Papers are also routinely asked to sit on a story, or bury it outright, as a favor in exchange for access. A leak of all New York Times emails would probably include a lot of the same sort of content and people I'm imagining in a Stratfor leak. The SNR wouldn't be nearly as favorable, since the Times has a much more public profile and a much broader scope than just global events. Stratfor's specific focus makes it much likelier that any given source, or any given chum of the CEO, has said something via email that could be pretty powerful, were it disclosed. I'd also wager that Stratfor content will be more candid, since it's a smaller world than mass market newspaper publishing.

jessedhillon 15y ago
It's a sad fact of subjectivity that you can, apparently seiously, call out anyone else for trolling. You've run every fallacious argument up the flagpole here. But it's the fault of jonhenry or any rational person for taking this issue up with you, since you admitted squarely in the beginning that your intellectual justification for this is "fuck it." The only thing preventing my using this line to justify the publication of internal emails between the 5 people who run my competitor is a thin, grey line that you seem to be drawing and redrawing continually. This is an intellectually and morally bankrupt idea you've got here, it hardly suffices for a proper argument as to why this is legitimate action.
forensic 15y ago
Nobody important uses the analysis service. Everyone important uses the CIA. Stratfor serves small and medium sized businesses with global operations. Huge military-industrial operations like Halliburton get their intelligence from the CIA. You don't know what Stratfor is. It's a niche news product, nothing more. Like any newspaper, they have secret sources. But the news product and analysis services offered by Stratfor are extremely benign. Anon is targeting them for no other reason than that Stratfor is a small business who hired a shitty engineering firm with bad security practices. Any script kiddie can go around finding non-technical businesses with poor security. Stratfor's 70-person staff is peopled entirely by nerdy writers with humanities degrees who spend all day compiling mostly-public information released by the world's parliament buildings and militaries. Stratfor deals in the analysis of public information for the benefit for private parties. No government agency relies on them, though they may subscribe, Stratfor will not be their primary source. The people who rely on Stratfor are companies too small and inconsequential to get CIA-access. Anyway I support the mission of Anonymous to hack the government and hack evil big corporations but Stratfor is not part of that complex and no juicy information is going to come out of this leak. It's going to be extremely mundane stuff and will probably get a few innocent cab drivers in 3rd world countries murdered.