Word: chatteringly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early last September you'd parked outside Lehman Brothers' Manhattan headquarters with a cell-phone scanner and listened only to some of the "chatter" coming out of Lehman's front office, you almost certainly would have realized that Lehman was going under. But to understand the wider consequences, how capitalism was about to do a somersault into the watery abyss, you would have needed to understand how Lehman fit into the global financial system. (Of course, listening to cell-phone conversations with a scanner in this country is flatly illegal. And you need a sophisticated decrypting device to listen...
...that's the thing about chatter: it usually makes sense only in context, when you have a lot of other information at your fingertips. (Watch TIME's video on the risks of chatter...
...Chatter is one of those floating espionage terms that can mean anything from secretly intercepted telephone calls and e-mails to the volume of communications traffic at a particular time over a particular line. A more technical definition of chatter might be the interception of any unguarded electronic communication between two people who expect privacy - people more likely to speak frankly and convey information they wouldn't in a public forum...
...America's 16 intelligence agencies by and large consider chatter the most reliable intelligence there is. But they also need to constantly remind themselves that it is a blunt tool, often as confusing as it is illuminating. The day of the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, there was initially a sharp spike in Soviet message traffic. The intelligence community knew something bad had just happened. But what? The immediate speculation was a change of Soviet leadership or even a plane crash. It wasn't until more reporting emerged, including that by the media, that it was understood...
...National Security Agency (NSA), which collects the vast bulk of chatter for this country, has no shortage of sophisticated equipment and no legal obstacles when it listens to chatter abroad. What it does have a problem with is making sense of the sea of chatter it sucks out of the air and the world's fiber-optic cables. The risk of misinterpretation or missing a vital piece of information is enormous. (See the top 10 Secret Service code names...