NSA Collects the Whole Voice Conversation of an Entire Nation
The Washington Post yesterday described a surveillance program called Mystic that uses a search tool called Retro to examine the content of large-scale voice collections. Mystic commenced in 2009, and achieved full operational status in 2011. "In the initial deployment," writes the Post, "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."