Max Fisher takes Stratfor to the woodshed:
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. Wikileaks calls this “secret cash bribes,” hints that this might violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and demands “political oversight.”
For comparison’s sake, The Atlantic often sends our agents into such dangerous locales as Iran or Syria. We call these men and women “reporters.” Much like Statfor’s agents, they collect intelligence, some of it secret, and then relay it back to us so that we may pass it on to our clients, whom we call “subscribers.” Also like Stratfor, The Atlantic sometimes issues “secret cash bribes” to on-the-ground sources, whom we call “freelance writers.” We also prefer to keep their cash bribes (“writer’s fees”) secret, and sometimes these sources are even anonymous.
Self-promotion really is America’s greatest natural resource.
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
That was my take too. I think Wikileaks should have bigger fish to fry.
c u n d gulag
And I’m sure The Atlantic’s super-smart economics writer, Megan McArdle, didn’t need any directions – she figured out how to use her $1,500 blender/chopper/slicer/dicer/maker-of-mound-and-mounds of cole-slaw/and look at all those julianned french-fries, and bechamel sauce-maker, all on her very own!
Steve
The quote sounds like they are taking Wikileaks to the woodshed as much as Stratfor, for exaggerating the nefarious nature of Stratfor’s business model. Oh noes, they pay people for dubious bits of information!
Wee Bey
The question is who is the bigger joke, Stratfor or Wikileaks?
Six to five and pick ’em.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
Well, sheat. You don’t need no private spy to answer that.
It’s like asking how many Catholics are in the Vatican.
PETA supporters in Canada? Pretty much all of them.
Comrade Mary
Well, the headline is “Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously”.
Egg Berry
As noted above, any organization that employs mcardle on economics is in no position to take anyone to a woodshed.
Amir Khalid
Stratfor’s sales & marketing people must be shitting bricks trying to explain this one away to their customers.
Brachiator
The Atlantic article starts out with an interesting assertion:
But when hackers screwed with Stratfor the first time around, nuggets like this were revealed.
So, yeah, maybe the Stratfor analyses are a big con. The thing is, a lot of the con and the conventional wisdom is soaked up by policy makers and people who have the ability to wreak havoc in the world.
It’s easy to mock and snark, but if the people have power and influence believe self serving bullshit, then being the impotent smart guy in the corner doesn’t mean very much.
Look at how much phony intelligence, denial and self serving bullshit informed the decision to invade Iraq, and fed the delusion that the US could either pacify the population or manage an occupation. Hell, even some liberals would spout nonsense about how the US might have been able to manage the occupation better. But all of this was based on stupidity, faulty intelligence, and a refusal to look at things from anything other than a Western centric viewpoint. And we seem to be doing the same thing in Afghnistan and Pakistan.
So, even if Stratfor’s info is a steaming pile of crap, I wonder how many in the Village, including Atlantic editors and writers, are on the subscription list?
Linda Featheringill
@DougJarvus Green-Ellis:
Maybe that decision was made by treehuggers. Wikileaks probably includes several of those.
Downpuppy
When The Atlantic did an article about Iraq, McArdle not only wrote it from her kitchen, she appears to have not even made a long distance phone call.
ericblair
@Brachiator:
Maybe. Or, if they’re us.army.mil addresses (AKO), this includes contractors, retirees, and families. The whole .mil domain has millions of users, so I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.
aimai
I don’t see why the conclusion isn’t that The Atlantic is as crappy as Stratfor, not that Stratfor isn’t big enough for Wikileaks to take down. I think there’s a huge value in exposing the corrupt and unscientific way that foreign policy information is gathered and disseminated. Saying “the emperor has no clothes” isn’t the less worth doing just because you are pointing out that lesser officials also rely on lies, fear, and intimidation to get away with public nudity.
aimai
MattR
@Brachiator:
Agreed. IMO, the Republican party and its policy ideas are a joke, but that does not mean that they are not influential. It may turn out that Strafor has no influence and it is all PR bluster, but the Atlantic article didn’t provide any solid evidence of this. (What it provided was evidence of Stratfor’s incompetence and their lack of real expertise but sadly that is not enough to disqualify you from being influential these days)
Someguy
So paying for information violates the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? Guess I’d better cancel that Lexis/Nexis account then. Wouldn’t want to get caught with my hand in the Reed-Elsevier cookie jar…
Svensker
@Brachiator:
This. My husband had a conversation a couple months ago with a Wall Street guy and said that Stratfor were a bunch of clowns. The Wall Street guy got all huffy and said, “Stratfor is a well-respected company on the Street.”
PeakVT
At the very least Wikileaks performed a service for Stratfor’s customers by providing a new way to judge the quality of its product. I don’t see why WL should be mocked for that.
Brachiator
@ericblair:
Here’s the deal. I know people with Stratfor accounts. Obviously, I cannot prove any claim that these people are influential, so I provide public and easily accessible links to articles about Stratfor subscribers.
None of these people take Stratfor material as Gospel. But neither do they dismiss it as junk.
You can easily follow the trail of foreign policy conventional wisdom, just as you can follow the trail of mainstream media conventional wisdom. The funny thing is that pundits and journalists claim that they are skeptical, cynical, discerning. And yet they end up at the same parties, stroke the same sources, and kiss the same asses.
@aimai:
Yep
Villago Delenda Est
@Svensker:
Well, that settles it.
Stratfor is in the club. They can do no wrong, no matter how badly they fuck up, no matter that their “inside information” is freely available on the web. They’re marketing geniuses. They can sell snake oil. They’re golden, as far as the Ferengi idiots are concerned.
“Look! Shiny!”
scav
What a comedown for poor old Tom F. Apparently the whitterings of his taxidrivers aren’t enough for the bespoke suit crowd. All hail those sharp boys in their sharp suits on the mean streets!
no, I’m not enjoying this
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Wee Bey:
My money is Strator – Wikileaks is just a bunch of kids and Starfor is supposed to be the VERY serious adults. So far Starfor has come across as a conservative LARP based on a Tom Clancy novel.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Really not the point, is it?
Here’s a claim about Stratfor’s influence:
So even if Stratfor is little more than a foreign policy grifter, peddling snake oil, if people who make decisions are eagerly drinking the snake oil and making decisions based on it, then who’s the real chump?
Stratfor might be the institutional equivalent to Ahmad Chalabi. Full of shit, but capable of causing a huge amount of harm when the morans in charge listen to him.
Poopyman
@Brachiator:
This is the point, and why Wikileaks is doing a valuable service in exposing them, despite the Atlantic’s snooty attitude.
Joel
Big fish aren’t going to be fooled by Anonymous’ tactics. Therefore, you have idiotic firms getting pwned, like Hunton and Williams and Stratfor. Idiots or no, these firms still have important clients and a surprising amount of influence. I think it’s still a worthwhile exercise.
priscianusjr
Judging by the kind of crap neo-con inspired “intelligence” we’ve been getting from the CIA lo these many years I’m not sure they’re much better.
Brachiator
@priscianusjr:
The CIA, Stratfor, State Department and others often get a lot of their material from the same place, and reinforce the BS when they get together and compare notes.
Nobody wants to look stupid and out of the loop, even when they are doing little more than copying from one another and pretending that they have solid gold sources.
jonas
How much you want to bet this asshat’s previous gig was as some attache in the Green Zone in 2003-2006?
jonas
@Brachiator: remember, though, it wasn’t so much that the CIA was producing bogus intelligence; it was the politicians in Cheney’s camp — aided and abetted by stenographers in the MSM — who were either 1. outright lying about what the intelligence said or 2. spinning ambiguous or ambivalent intelligence as a “slam dunk”.
Brachiator
@jonas:
Uh, no. It wasn’t just about the CIA producing bogus intelligence, it was about failures to correctly asssess the intelligence, made worse by Bush and Cheney determination to do something about Iraq. For example, you can see in this snippet how the State Department let Colin Powell down (his own freaking agency).
A lot of people have an exagerated sense of the competence of intelligence services, but too often it is about guys who think they are smart, getting played. It’s sometimes exactly like how the heads of the British Intelligence Service in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy end up getting played by the Soviets and their own internal traitor.
Ricki Tarr: Everything the Circus thinks is gold is shit.
By the way, there are claims that Cheney had people in Defense, at State, and within a few other agencies, who made sure that intelligence work was slanted to conform to his policy aims. But this is, of course, just speculation.
vheidi
@Brachiator:
Exactly this.
Frankensteinbeck
@Poopyman:
Isn’t the point that Wikileaks took Stratfor seriously as an espionage organization, when they’re a bunch of dumbshits collecting information anybody could? The take down here wasn’t that nobody listens to Stratfor, it’s that Stratfor’s practices are bland and unthreatening no matter what Wikileaks and Stratfor themselves would like us to believe. Fisher doesn’t say Stratfor has no influence, he says it’s not an espionage organization and Wikileaks is being stupid by pretending they are.
EDIT – The Village is full of Conventional Wisdom sources. It’s worthwhile to point one out, but that’s not what was done here.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
And you know this, how?
Annamal
*Sigh* well my government was apparently treating STRATFOR as a genuine source
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/6193689/Hackers-put-NZ-information-at-risk
So this might at least stop them from doing that.
Brachiator
@Annamal:
Very interesting stuff. Thanks for this.
LT
Wtf? I’m lost, John. The guy is making the same idiotic mistake the guy from the CSM made in a truly embarrassing article yesterday: he equates a private intel gathering company – working for private companies – with newspapers and mags – who gather info FOR THE FUCKING PUBLIC. And you seem to be buying it.
What’d I miss? I’m sure it’s a lot…
El Cid
I read STRATFOR’s free stuff for a long time, because I thought was pretty much a blog of spook-minded bloggers with some extra content if you paid.
I had noooooo idea how seriously they took themselves, or expected to be taken, until quite recently, and that was a long, long time after they ceased being interesting.