How the terror alert level was raised in late 2003:
CIA analysts mistakenly thought they’d discovered a mother lode of secret al-Qaida messages. They thought they had found secret messages on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language television news channel, hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the “crawl,” where news headlines are summarized.
U.S. officials tell NBC News that CIA experts � technicians working for the Directorate of Science and Technology � thought they had found numbers embedded in the crawl signaling upcoming attacks; dates and flight numbers, and geographic coordinates for targets, including the White House, Seattle’s Space Needle, even the tiny town of Tappahanock, Va. What the analysts thought they had found was something called “steganography” � messages hidden inside a video image.
It’s reassuring to know that the CIA TIVOs are up and running. As long as they maintain ther live feed to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear facility surveillance cameras, we’ll be just fine.