The temporary shuttering of American embassies and consulates this week has been blamed on intercepted "chatter" among al Qaeda leaders, indicating a possible terror plot. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that "chatter means conversation among terrorists about the planning that's going on."
"Chatter" is defined by dictionaries as incessantly idle or trivial talk, but why do we use it for something so deadly serious as a 9/11-style terrorist strike? (click below to read more)
For much of its history, "chatter" has been reserved for speech at its most frivolous. When it emerged as a noun and verb in the 13th century, the word onomatopoetically described the rapid, twittering noise of birds. A chattering person, by extension, could be dismissed as producing more sound than sense, as in Kate's "chattering tongue" in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew." (In literature, women stereotypically have been the ones doing the chattering.)
New technology opened new channels for chatter. The telephone was one: An 1897 article in the New York Tribune bemoaned "the senseless chatter and constant 'helloing' " of the "telephone maniacs."
As radio dispatches assumed a central place in the military maneuvers of World War II, seemingly innocuous chatter could take on crucial significance. Intercepting the enemy's radio chatter became a key task of intelligence-gathering, as when U.S. forces targeted and killed Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto after naval intelligence picked up chatter revealing his itinerary for an inspection tour in the South Pacific.
Signals intelligence, or Sigint, ramped up during the Cold War and the war on terror, with snooping expanded to the whole panoply of electronic communication. The jargon of the intelligence agencies went public after 9/11, when officials made assurances that "chatter" from al Qaeda and other terrorist groups was being closely monitored. Bush administration officials like National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice openly discussed the "chatter" in the system and the corresponding threat levels.
Unlike the radio intercepts gathered in past conflicts, listening in on electronic chatter often comes down to detecting the volume of traffic along particular pathways rather than picking up individual messages and deciphering them. The more chatter among suspected parties, the greater the cause for alarm.
As Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in his 2005 book, "Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping," this once-innocent term abruptly "developed a new and ominous meaning," and "now the chatter on any given day is a barometer of our national panic."
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