New NSA revelations: Agency can record phone network of an entire country The U.S. National Security Agency has created a surveillance system that can record all phone calls in a targeted foreign nation, allowing it to play back and listen to conversations up to 30 days later, the Washington Post reported. A classified summary of the system said the collection effort was recording every single conversation nationwide in the first target country, storing billions of conversations in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears out the oldest calls as new ones are made, the Post reported. The NSA is making George Orwell seem unimaginative. -Zeke Johnson of Amnesty International USA The voice interception program is known as MYSTIC and started in 2009, with its retrospective retrieval capability, called RETRO, reaching full strength in 2011 against the first target nation. A senior manager for the program likened it to a time machine that can replay voices from any phone call without the need to identify a person for spying in advance. The U.S. must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify [new and emerging] threats. -White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden --- Article summarized by Yahoo News Digest. Available for iOS in the App Store at itunes.apple/us/app/yahoo-news-atom/id784982356?ls=1&mt=8.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:50:35 +0000
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