An incorrect CIA analysis caused U.S. authorities to cancel more than two dozen international flights and raise the Homeland Security Department's terrorism alert level in late 2003, NBC news reported June 27. According to the report, the CIA believed that Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite news channel based in Qatar, was transmitting coded information to terrorists using the moving text along the bottom of the screen, known as the "crawl." Al Jazeera, the agency believed, was using a technique called "steganography" to conceal the codes. At the time, CIA analysts believed the secret messages involved dates, locations and targets of terrorist attacks, including flight numbers of international flights and geographic coordinates of targets.