Unveiling Stratfor 2: Anonymous. A threat assessment?

Forgive me for saying this, Stratfor guys … but does a threat assessment usually consist of a bunch of people talking out of their asses with no real clue about the topic they’re assessing?

You guys appear to be quite intelligent, and can be pretty amusing, but this particular email, dated 24/10/2011 20:54 (DocID: 156506),  just made me laugh (at you, not with you). 

“I agree. I haven't seen any defining attributes of Anonymous as a group.

They may not even know the identities of each other. There are several

facebook / twitter Anonymous pages, which seem to be run by different

individuals.”

“But we don't know what information Anonymous' adherents have access to,

and doubt they have such information that provides any sort of

existential threat to the cartels as a whole or their networks.

This is a problem with the threat assessment.”

The problem with the threat assessment, apparently, and according to the analysts, is the fact that Stratfor has no clue who or what Anonymous is, how to define Anonymous, or even what Anonymous capabilities are.

So, they realize that they don’t have what they need to do a threat assessment and then proceed to do a threat assessment? Okay, well they get one brownie point towards their honesty badge. I’ll give them that.

“Yes, it's not exactly a 'threat assessment'. just say we don't know. And we can say

we doubt they have it because they haven't shown much capabilities to

get at insider/confidential/classified information, rather mostly DDOS

attacks. However, there are people that have demonstrated such

capabilities, and its possible they also joined an 'anonymous'

campaign--like whoever got the recent personal data out of the Sony

PSN.”

Speculative and baseless at the time it was written, but no doubt later proven to be true given that Stratfor themselves later got hacked. Lol.

I just have to wonder why the focus of this “threat assessment” is Anonymous? Isn’t bringing down organized crime considered to be a good thing by Stratfor?

This series of articles is being produced as the result of an investigative partnership organised by WikiLeaks, and is based on data obtained and released by WikiLeaks.