NSA Can Retrieve, Replay All Phone Calls From a Country From the Past 30 Days

An anonymous reader sends this news from the Washington Post: "The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden. ... 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."

Comments

How?

[Bradmont]

So do they have the cooperation of the target country? Or have the infiltrated the entire communications infrastructure of the world? This is really creepy.

Re: How about... Malaysia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we really supposed to believe that 13 years after 9/11 that the US doesn't know the location of every airborne plane in the world? Would it really be that hard compared to some of the supposed capabilities of the NSA we've been hearing about lately. The plane crashed, everyone is dead, the NSA has no incentive to help locate the wreckage as that will simply give away the secret capability. Lose a plane in the Atlantic Ocean bound for the United States and watch how fast it turns up.

**criminal elements of...**

[globaljustin]

I hear you...you're don't sound like a nutcase **to me**...you go a bit off on a few of your list there but that's not why i'm writing.

It's wrong to say "the US government"

Our government is the best system yet implemented.

The problem is criminality. Even if it goes up to the President (and it surely has...many times...recently) that does not mean that **our system of governmance** is faulty.

Our economic system (hardcore captialism) may surely encourage bribery...but in totalitarian communist countries you find examples of **more** bribery comparitively...or at least equal ammounts

YES...the CIA "dealt crack" in the 80s, research brainwashing, etc etc...and maybe that whole organization has been rotten from the start but it doesn't define **what the good people are trying to do**

According to its stated documents, the US of A could be the *best country in the world*....we have a *long way to go* but our problems arent because of our system...its b/c our **system is infected**

Yes, the "infected system" line could be used for any country's problems...but precisely because the US has so many channels in place for **the people** to do the right thing...because we have the *power to change* means we are held to a higher standard than say, North Korea or Ukraine

We can clean house...we can get rid of the criminals in our governemnt...the sun will still rise, and we will have ****NEW PROBLEMS****....that's progress!

Re:**criminal elements of...**

[dryeo]

Our government is the best system yet implemented

You are joking aren't you? Or perhaps you really believe a system of government invented close to 250 years ago and barely tweeked since then is perfect and there has been no advances in government since then?
There are serious problems with the American government leading to the current inverted totalitarian state, a state with 1% of its population in prison, a state that removes basic rights from those incarcerated people so they can never take part in regular society, a state with 2 parties that are basically 2 wings of one party, a party of the rich (how much money does it take to run for office and how do they acquire that money), a government that treats its constitution as toilet paper as it is too hard to change or follow, a government with the best propaganda machine ever seen, even though it has been out sourced to private industry, a government that strives to have a population who are not into politics, a government that can produce people like you who parrot talking points like "having the best government ever invented" without knowing anything about other forms of democracies and probably just internally comparing to various regular totalitarian states.