Confessions of a Stratfor subscriber
. Unfortunately after all this time as a low-level subscriber, Stratfor has never given me the inside running on a story. Not even once.

Nor, during my years travelling for Foreign Correspondent, have I ever seen evidence that Stratfor's big corporate clients, who pay many thousands of dollars for their subscriptions, received insights they couldn't have gleaned if they were avid readers of Britain's Economist, the august US journal Foreign Affairs, or the excellent Australian foreign policy blog, The Interpreter.

Stratfor's real talent lies in marketing to corporate America.

While covering international stories, I've read Stratfor's take on the events in which I was immersed. Often an interesting read, yet sometimes I disagreed with their analysis. Occasionally, they simply got the facts wrong.
Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously

.what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland "analysis" that had already appeared in the previous day's New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.

It's true that Stratfor employs on-the-ground researchers. They are not spies. On today's Wikileaks release, one Middle East-based NGO worker noted on Twitter that when she met Stratfor's man in Cairo, he spoke no Arabic, had never been to Egypt before, and had to ask her for directions to Tahrir Square. Stratfor also sometimes pays "sources" for information.