It's no coincidence the recent spate of terror alerts follows the NSA mass surveillance scandals. [View all]

The surveillance state is under scrutiny, the people and Congress might cut their funding.

So they are under pressure to do something, anything, that shows the money is well spent and produces useful information to stop terrorism.

The natural result of this is higher ranking officials are telling lower ranking people Hey you better find some useful stuff in all the collected data.

The "increased chatter" we've heard about on the news is entirely because they've been looking at the data more during the past few weeks.