Feeding Our Fear of Flying

Is a terrorist attack on an American city imminent? First the US Department of Homeland Security upped its color-coded terror warning from yellow to orange, claiming there had been a worrisome rise in chatter between terrorists; then six flights from Paris to Los Angeles were cancelled after US officials told French officials that al-Qaeda types might hijack one of the planes to use as a missile against America; then US officials insisted that selected foreign airlines should post armed marshals on flights to America; now British Airways has become embroiled, with BA flights to Washington and Riyadh cancelled on the basis of 'security advice."

Of course terrorists might be plotting to hijack planes -- but for all the cancelled flights, armed guards and endless column inches about the return of terror, it remains uncertain whether or when an attack will occur. The investigations into the Air France and BA flights have turned up little, except that a five-year-old child on one of the French planes had a similar-sounding name to a Tunisian terrorist. The British Air Line Pilots Association believes that the cancellation of BA flight 223 to Washington last week was a 'shot across the bows" by America, an attempt to get skeptical BA pilots to accept having armed air marshals on their planes.

Whatever the prospect of an attack might be, the recent security scares highlight some big problems with the "war on terror." America and Britain's approach to the alleged terror threat appears less as a measured reaction to specific information, than a panicky response to often indecipherable "chatter;" not so much an attempt to deal with specific threats, as a very public fretting about a potential attack occurring somewhere, somehow, some time. By going public with all sorts of intelligence -- reliable or otherwise -- the US and UK elites appear effectively to be projecting their own uncertainty on to the rest of us, and fostering a climate of paranoia in the process.

The US Department of Homeland Security kick-started the current terror alert when it raised its threat warning to orange, in response to an "unprecedented increase in "chatter"" -- the term used by intelligence officials to describe communication levels between suspected terror groups and individuals. But how reliable is "chatter," as an indicator of terrorists' intentions or imminent action? Unlike human intelligence -- which collects information through human contact with a terror group or enemy state, usually through infiltration -- "chatter," or signal intelligence, is collected by technical means, by using satellites to eavesdrop on phone conversations and email correspondence between suspected terrorists. Not surprisingly, such chatter often proves inadequate for those involved in counter-terrorism.

"Chatter is a descriptive term," says John Hamre, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. "Much like when you walk into a room and there are many conversations underway, you can not clearly hear any complete conversation, only random pieces." Hamre, who served as deputy secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, tells me that "chatter" also refers to background noise. So as it relates to intelligence, chatter reflects a larger, though not necessarily a large, number of messages that have suspicious references, which appear related but with inadequate specific details.... Often the capacity to analyze these references is quite limited, so they are aggregated into general categories."

Hamre doesn't believe that the French or British flights were cancelled on the basis of chatter alone. "I don't think they would have cancelled specific flights based on non-specific information. I suspect there were specific references to flight numbers or take-off times." This may be so -- though some security experts reportedly suspect that BA flight 223 may have been cancelled because intelligence officials "heard" terrorist chatter about United Nations Resolution 223, which criticizes Israeli treatment of Palestinians and is often cited by Arab leaders and activists, or that terrorists allegedly picked on this flight because of its numerical symbolism.