NSA ‘Can Collect All Phone Calls In One Nation’

The National Security Agency (NSA) has created a system that allows it to record every single phone conversation within a country outside of the US, according to a leak from Edward Snowden and officials with knowledge of the matter. The country in question has been blanked out from the documents which were published first in the Washington Post.

One manager compared the Mystic programme, which uses a tool called Metro, to a time machine. Agents had the ability to review call recordings for a month after they were taken, the Washington Post reported.

NSA mass data collection

Whilst analysts only listen to one percent of calls, this is still a significant number, given the masses of communications the NSA picked up.

An NSA spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of Mystic, saying new threats were “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats”.

It appears US citizens’ data were collected by the tools too, according to current and former American officials, as they were incidentally scooped up in communications to foreign nations.

The data taken by the Metro tool was at points so epic it made scaling a problem too. One agent said, in the first year of deployment in 2009, that the initiative had “long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle”.

It’s unclear how the US will curtail mass data collection such as those carried out by Mystic, following promises to limit the NSA’s powers from President Obama.

One of the provisos he made appeared to leave a loophole for agencies to continue mass collection, saying the limits “do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection”. Indeed, Obama allowed for bulk collection to continue in a wide range of cases, including investigations of espionage, terrorism, cyber security threats and transnational criminal threats.

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