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Watch enough cable news and you'll hear the word "chatter" tossed around liberally (and conservatively, too, for that matter). It's usually used in expressions like "increased terrorist chatter" or "alarming chatter" forcing the handy color-coded threat level of our Homeland Security Department to switch to a more prepared shade of orange or perhaps a full-blown blaze of red. For the meaning of the term, we found an informative article from January 2004 on Spiked Online titled "Chatter, chatter everywhere." The article's author defines chatter as "intelligence... collected by technical means, by using satellites to eavesdrop on phone conversations and email correspondence between suspected terrorists." The article
describes how chatter pales in comparison to spies collecting human intelligence on the ground. While spies can gather information and report back, chatter is often intercepted in bits and pieces and has to be cobbled together and deciphered by analysts. We tracked down another great article on chatter from the BBC. This look at "How terror talk is tracked" describes intelligence agencies' use of chatter to capture two senior Al-Qaeda suspects in 2003. One was tracked by a voice sample taken from a phone call; the other was nabbed thanks to an intercepted e-mail. To end our chattering about chatter, we found an op/ed piece from the Middle East
Times. Writer P. Mitchell Prothero says while the U.S. continues to intercept more and more chatter, "it remains unclear whether such information is an accurate harbinger of future terrorist acts." In his opinion, spikes in chatter may be the media-savvy use of disinformation by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. So while the use of chatter isn't perfect, it plays an integral part in intelligence operations. Don't let the chatter of jargon-spewing talking heads on your television foil your attempt at understanding!
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