Word: chatteringly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...operative back from Iraq says the room for exploiting our gullibility when it comes to chatter is wide. "There is little understanding of deception in the agency anymore. As a service, it doesn't do deception operations and therefore doesn't believe they are run against...
...understand just how misleading chatter can be, you have only to go back to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations in 2003, the one in which he incorrectly - if plausibly - claimed Saddam Hussein had held on to his weapons of mass destruction. Among other pieces of intelligence, Powell's case turned on an intercepted voice communication between two Iraqi officials. But as we now know, the two were only speculating - in complete ignorance...
...Powell hadn't spent time working in intelligence. The first lesson any good intelligence officer will learn in the field is that chatter is a trap easily fallen into. When I was in the Middle East I'd sit down every so often with a commercially available Bearcat scanner and listen to random conversations. It was mostly people griping about the shortage of bread or the price of gasoline. I improved my Arabic but little more. Once, however, something very intriguing came up on the air: the movement of tanks out of barracks. I was elated, jumping to the conclusion...
...risk of seriously irritating NSA's sing-along choir, I'll take the definition of chatter one step further. Chatter can be something as simple as an overheard conversation next to you at a café. Not too many years ago, CIA analysts asked operatives overseas to make daily notes of what the locals were saying - random conversations at dinners, on trains, at the post office. It all amounted to little more than impressions, the locals' hopes and frustrations. Not exactly hard intelligence, but it put the analysts into the swim of a particular country, allowing them...
...would be a mistake to think of chatter as being just an intelligent reading of the blogosphere. When the former CIA director George Tenet said in testimony the "system was blinking red" in the months leading up to 9/11, he in effect was referring to chatter - interceptions, rumors picked up by friendly governments, sorting through Osama bin Laden's propaganda. Look at the 9/11 Commission report, and although you won't see specifics as to how or when bin Laden intended to hit the U.S., it was clear he intended to. Even with a warning as vague as this, many...