Terror isn't what happens to you, but the fear that something might happen to you.

Fefe, aka Felix von Leitner, is a software-developer and member of German's Chaos Computer Club, a self-described "galactic community of life's beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information", or, more to the point, a Hacker organisation. He also has a blog, where he often shares his - more or less serious - well...interesting ideas about politics. This serious/non-serious slant is already apparent at the top of his site, where he invites the readers to send him "nice conspiracy-links" ("schöne Verschwörungslinks"). But at other times, Fefe has some real eye-openers, or just very interesting and thought-worthy content. Yesterday was one of those times.

Yesterday, Fefe updated his "Terror-Thermometer", a little graph where he shows the occurrence of the words *terror* (terror), *gefahr* (danger), *gefähr* (part of the german word for "dangerous"), *anschlag* (attack), and *anschläg* (part of the german plural of attack) in the online articles of some big news organisations over time.

These organisations are German news mag Der Spiegel, German newspaper Tagesspiegel, news agencies DPA, Reuters and Ria Novosti, German broadcasting's Tagesschau.de and Heute.de, British Guardian and BBC and, finally the liberal media's favourite, The New York Times.

Funnily enough, none of these news providers are as far right and terror-hyping as, say, Fox News or the various Tabloids. Still, they achieve an average of more than one mention of these "terror-indicators" across their whole selection of articles - even those not about terrorism, or even politics. Whoa. And occasionally, this peaks at nearly 7 mentions per article: The highest peak at the End of 2008, can be explained by the attacks in Mumbai. But then there's this peculiar peak at around 5 terrors (is that the SI-unit?) at the beginning of this year. That's a bit of a surprise, as I can't see any particular event that drove the press-hype to these levels.

Nevertheless, trends.google.com seems to bear these findings out (even though these are search, not news or website trends):

blue = terror; red = attack; orange = danger

So, any idea, where the increase in the beginning of 2010 comes from? Or is this some sort of death of a thousand little cuts for our feling of security and our clinging to civil rights?

You probably have found some flaws in this "study" already: It's not peer-reviewed, the methodology isn't revealed completely (Fefe himself doesn't give the exact websites he used, doesn't describe the searching-algorithm, doesn't give the exact English words he searched for, and doesn't give exact and raw numbers to take a more in-depth look (google trends doesn't do that, either). But I found it highly interesting nevertheless. Seems like the noise is increasing