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:**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.