The Washington Post: NSA "writes" 100% of all calls to an unnamed country

One of the slides for the NSA workers

The details of an organization such as the NSA, gradually, with the filing of Edward Snowden, are overgrown with more and more details, often almost fantastic.

For example, it was previously reported that in the United States there is a system that works in the interests of public services, which records phone numbers, call time and it looks like the duration of a telephone conversation. But no one said that there is a system that records the telephone conversations themselves, and the system stores audio recording for 30 days. This system does not work to record calls within the United States, but in some unnamed country (which one, the journalists of the publication could not figure out). All this was put into operation in 2009, and the system went into full production in 2011.
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The system itself intercepting and recording telephone conversations received the promising name MYSTIC. This is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation with meaning - after all, only paranoid and some information security experts believed in state surveillance systems that record telephone calls from citizens. And now it turns out that the “mystical”, non-existent system is a reality.

At the same time, not only the NSA, but also other public services and organizations have access to the MYSTIC database. If someone starts to suspect a phone number of “cooperation with foreign intelligence”, or other bad things, you can find a record of the number owner’s conversation with his telephone interlocutors in the database by phone number. Let me remind you that the records are saved for 30 days, after which, when new data is received, the old files are erased. According to The Washington Post, it’s about millions of records every month.

In addition to this, an unnamed country, the NSA planned to introduce a similar system into the telephone networks of some other countries. But which countries exactly are meant - not yet reported.

Via washingtonpost