Word: cia
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...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...
...unreliable as it is, chatter is the future of intelligence. When agent reporting - clandestine human sources - is good, it is very good. But the vast majority of the people who volunteer to spy for the U.S. do so out of desperation or a grudge. From the start, the CIA presumes they are lying, distorting and fabricating information. It will take an intelligence officer years to sort out good from bad sources. And even then he will have to fall back on chatter for his vetting - though with chatter, there is a presumption of honesty and frankness when two people believe...
...Internet, chatter promises to remain the mainstay of spying. Wars are messier than ever, the world's ungoverned spaces are growing, and there are more and more nonstate actors, all of which makes the old-fashioned on-the-ground intelligence methods less and less relevant. The days of the CIA devoting 60% of its time trying to recruit a mole to steal the secret minutes from the Soviet Politburo are long gone...
...Betancourt as carrying on an affair with a Colombian hostage, acting like a privileged blue-blood - "a frickin' princess" in Stansell's telling - bossing around the other prisoners and hoarding precious books, food and a transistor radio. They even claim that she told the guerrillas that the Americans were CIA agents. Asked to elaborate on Betancourt, Stansell told TIME: "That's an infection I lived with for many years. I'd just like to be inoculated and move on." Betancourt has yet to respond to the Americans' accusations...