[pp.int.general] The phone call time machine

[pirate at valio.ch]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-surveillance-program-reaches-into-the-past-to-retrieve-replay-phone-calls/2014/03/18/226d2646-ade9-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html

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.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one  
that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a  
person be identified in advance for surveillance.

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.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding  
details that could be used to identify the country where the system is  
being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s  
telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that  
prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a  
growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of  
discriminants,” as President Obama put it in January. By design, they  
vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the  
conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national  
security interests.

In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.

[...see link above for full text...]