Word: chatteringly
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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...
...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...
...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...