14 DAY TRIAL // Wondering just how extensive the NSA’s powers are? Well, you should know that the intelligence agency is recording all of the phone calls in a certain, unnamed, country.
According to the Washington Post, one document from the Snowden stash reveals that the National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls to the point of being able to rewind and review conversations a month after they took place.
It’s like a time machine, one senior manager at the NSA said about the program dubbed “MYSTIC.”
The program began in 2009, but it only reached full capacity two years later, in 2011, when it was put to test by targeting a nation of the world.
Initially, collection systems recorded every single conversation in the country, storing them in a 30-day rolling buffer. This means that the oldest calls were cleared out as the new ones arrived. This allows the agency to retrieve “audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call,” the file reveals.
Only about 1 percent of the calls were listened to, but that still amounts to millions of voice clippings that were sent for processing and long-term storage. This makes it obvious that vacuuming all this data cannot possibly be all in the interest of protecting national security since it’s irrational to believe that every single citizen in a country would want to harm the United States.
The name of the country that the NSA spied on unashamedly has been withheld at the request of the US government, the Washington Post revealed, in an effort to explain why the name is missing completely or why there are no details that could identify the state. This is the most extensive program of its kind. None of the programs before it violated the privacy rights of all individuals in an entire country in such a manner.
MYSTIC’s RETRO tool (short for “retrospective retrieval”), the one that goes through all the recorded phone calls, was built for a single operation, but the budget assigned for secretive intelligence activities added five more countries to the list of nations that the NSA should spy on, indicating to clear plans to expand.
Of course, it’s not the first time that the NSA engaged in bulk collection of data, but MYSTIC is easily the most aggressive of them all. US officials believe this capability is essential.
Although refusing to comment the current revelations, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council told the Washington Post that new threats are often hidden within large and complex systems of modern global communications.
At the same time, the NSA spokesperson didn’t exactly comment on the issue, but chose to throw a rock at journalists, calling the “continuous and selective” reporting of specific techniques and tools to be highly detrimental to national security, even though there’s been no obvious consequence thus far aside from a really big hit taken by the country’s image outside its borders.