The NSA is Recording and Storing Every Single Phone Call in a Foreign Country

The National Security Agency
(NSA) has built and is apparently currently operating a program
that allows them to capture and review every single phone call made
inside a foreign country, according to a new report
from
The Washington Post based on documents supplied by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 

Basically, the NSA is DVRing an entire country’s worth of phone
conversations. From the Post story:

The voice interception program, 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 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.

Right now, the program is operational in at least one country.
Yet although it was built with collection from only one foreign
nation in mind, the agency has contemplated using it on other
nations as well. It’s possible, in fact, that the program has
expanded beyond its initial target already:

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that
high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries,
if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years
ago as a “unique one-off capability,” but last
year’s secret intelligence budget named five more
countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive
metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place
by last October.

There’s no filtering mechanism whatsoever. Any extraneous
material that’s collected is excused as “incidental” collection,
including the phone calls of any Americans who happen to be in the
country, or who happen to be calling someone who is located
there.

The NSA isn’t the only U.S. intelligence organization to have
access to material collected through the program, although the
Post doesn’t specify which other agencies can get the
data, or under what conditions. 

And because the target is foreign, the program is only loosely
bound by legal restrictions:

Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas
intelligence work.

“Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence collection is not
regulated by any statute passed by Congress,” said Timothy H.
Edgar, the former director of privacy and civil liberties on
Obama’s national security staff. “There’s a lot of focus on the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but
that’s only a slice of what the intelligence community does.”

All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate
intelligence purpose, he said, but that “still leaves a gap for
activities that otherwise basically aren’t regulated by law because
they’re not covered by FISA.”

So, what we’ve got is a highly secret, hugely sweeping program
that, despite being intended for just one target, has either
already been expanded or is about to be, and that shares
information with other unnamed agencies, and that operates without
much law to govern its use.