Report: NSA Can Swallow a "Nation’s Telephone Network Whole"

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https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/03/18-7


Emblem of the MYSTIC program on a cover slide from a weekly briefing slide deck from the NSA's Special Source Operations team

The National Security Agency has the ability to record every single phone call made in an unnamed foreign country and can rewind and revisit those calls up to a month later, The Washington Post revealed Tuesday.

Citing "people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden," reporters Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani outline the NSA's "MYSTIC" voice interception program and its RETRO (retrospective retrieval) tool, which was first used against a country in 2011.

"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," according to The Washington Post.

While the report's authors did not disclose which country this occurred in, at the request of the NSA, they note that documents indicate "similar operations elsewhere."