NSA can record 100 percent calls of foreign country

WASHINGTON

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, The Washington Post reported.
The newspaper cited in its report US people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.
A manager for the programme compares it to a time machine – one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance, says a report posted Tuesday.
According to the paper, the voice interception programme, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.
In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.
The paper report says the call buffer opens a door “into the past”, the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call”.
“Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.”
At the request of US officials, The Washington Post said, it is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.
“No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.”
The paper reports that bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of discriminants”, as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to US national security interests.
The newspaper cites Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council as declining to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities”.
Speaking generally, she said, “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats”.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an emailed statement, said “continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect”.