U.S.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has created a surveillance system that can record “100 percent” of a foreign country's phone calls, allowing it to play back and listen to the conversations up to a month later, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The newspaper cited unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the system as well as documents supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who since last year has leaked extensive data revealing sweeping American spying activities.
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, the Post reported.
The newspaper said that at the request of U.S. officials, it was withholding details that could be used to identify the nation where the system is being used or others where it might be used in the future. The Post cited documents that envisioned similar U.S. spying operations in other nations.
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.
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 newspaper reported.
The Post said that no other disclosed NSA program captures a nation's telephone network in its entirety.
Current and former U.S. officials quoted anonymously by the Post said large numbers of conversations would be gathered using the system.
Civil libertarians are concerned that this program and others like it will target other countries and that the NSA will eventually hold the data longer than what was defined by its original charter and use it for other reasons.
"This is a truly chilling revelation, and it's one that underscores how high the stakes are in the debate we're now having about bulk surveillance," Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "The NSA has always wanted to record everything, and now it has the capacity to do so."
The White House would not comment on the specific program described by the Post. But National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said information sought by the U.S. intelligence community is, in many cases, hidden in the "large and complex system" of global communications.
"The United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats," Hayden said in a statement. She said the presidential directive that authorizes this type of collection "makes clear that signals intelligence collected in bulk may only be used to meet specific security requirements."
The NSA is authorized to collect in bulk signals intelligence — the type of intelligence that comes from radio signals and communications, for example, as long as the purpose of the collection is to counter threats regarding espionage, terrorism, proliferation, cyber security, safety of U.S. troops and transnational crime.
Bulk collection means collecting everything, even if some of what's collected has nothing to do with national security. Most of the conversations collected under the NSA program would be irrelevant, the Post said.
The NSA would not confirm the existence of the MYSTIC program. But a spokeswoman said that the NSA's collection programs are legal and done for national security purposes.
"NSA does not conduct signals intelligence collection in any country, or anywhere in the world, unless it is necessary to advance U.S. national security and foreign policy interests and to protect its citizens and the citizens of its allies and partners from harm," NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines told the Associated Press in an email.
Vines said it jeopardizes national security when details about classified intelligence programs are made public.
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