The National Security Agency (NSA) 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. The documents said in a leak supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post.
MYSTIC that began in 2009 and was fully operational until 2011, can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.
The NSA is authorized to collect in bulk signals intelligence - the type of intelligence that comes from radio signals and communications, as long as the purpose of the collection is to counter threats regarding espionage, terrorism, proliferation, cyber security, safety of the U.S. troops and transnational crime.
Bulk collection means collecting everything, even if some of what's collected has nothing to do with national security. Most of the conversations collected under the NSA program would be irrelevant.
