Citing leaked documents from Edward Snowden and people with direct knowledge of the matter, The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency can retrieve all phone calls made in the past month from a foreign country. Although the report did not mention the name of the country in order to safeguard operations, the operation is codenamed MYSTIC. It started in 2009 and peaked on the targeted nation two years later, the report said.
The Washington Post report wrote, "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.... 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."
However, US officials defended this kind of data gathering capacity. While National Security Council Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden did not want to comment on particular intelligence activities, she did say that there are "new or emerging threats" that lurk in the vast and modern global communications systems "and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats."
While the agency is needed to limit the spying of innocent Americans in particular, all-encompassing surveillance operations make this rather difficult. The Washington Post reported that the NSA makes no effort to filter or remove these calls since these are considered communications that are "acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets."
TechCrunch reported that President Barack Obama has already suggested several reforms to the way the government gathers intelligence. One of these is by putting bulk phone and Internet data together with private firms and letting the government make a request each time they want access to the data.
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