NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

The Washington Post reports NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

"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."

This is pretty astounding. They didn't name the country that it was used it (or the potential others). They did also say that it would pick up and record any calls that Americans had with that country and that the NSA made no effort to filter those out.