25 Aug 2015.

Among Stratfor's customers were clients and subscribers. Clients paid for custom work. They included Hunt Oil, Dow Chemical, Parker Drilling, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines, the US Defence Intelligence Agency, and others. I gave detailed examples of Stratfor's custom work for individual clients toward the end of this article. Subscribers, on the other hand, paid for non-custom products, mainly (or perhaps only) newsletters that the firm sold.

The customers listed in the stratfor_full_b.txt.gz file are all individuals. This suggests that they are subscribers and not clients, although precision would require checking them all to be certain. In other words, whoever answered Brown's question probably misinformed him by stating that the data was a list of clients, which would of course be much more valuable than a list of mere subscribers. That Brown assumed the person was correct is further evidence that he never opened the file.