The group’s reputation among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners is poor; they are considered a punchline more often than a source of valuable information or insight. As a former recipient of their “INTEL REPORTS” (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), 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.

However, it’s worth noting that Fisher’s thesis, which seems to be based on hearsay and conjecture alone rather than hard evidence, is getting debated heavily in the comments, with some suggesting he’s naïve. “The entire vibe of your piece is so snarky and so obviously full of anti-Wikileaks sentiment that it’s hard to know whether to take you seriously or not,” one commenter writes.