WASHINGTON, D.C. – The United States 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.
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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.
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.
The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says,
enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the
time of the original call.” 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.
At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding
details that could be used to identify the country where the system is
being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.
No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s
telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that
prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a
growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.
Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of
discriminants,” as President Barack Obama put it in January. By design,
they vacuum up all the data they touch – meaning that most of the
conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national
security interests.
In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.
In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security
Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence
activities.” Speaking generally, she said “new or emerging threats” are
“often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global
communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals
intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these
threats.”
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an emailed statement, said that
“continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools
used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly
detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our
allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.”
Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume
eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not
been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a “unique
one-off capability,” but last year’s secret intelligence budget named
five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive
metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place by
last October.
The budget did not say whether the NSA now records calls in quantity
in those countries, or expects to do so. A separate document placed high
priority on planning “for MYSTIC accesses against projected new mission
requirements,” including “voice.”
Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal
of content from U.S. citizens who telephone, visit and work in the
target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17
pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who
don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and
that we take their privacy concerns into account.”
In a presidential policy directive, Obama instructed the NSA and
other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather
intelligence on one of six specified threats, including nuclear
proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that
limits on bulk collection “do not apply to signals intelligence data
that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection.”
The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a
telephone-headed staff. Among the agency’s bulk collection programs
disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique.
Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of either
metadata – which does not include content – or text, such as email
address books.
Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less
suited than text for processing, storage and search. Indeed, there are
indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the
NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.
In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the
project “has long since reached the point where it was collecting and
sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle.”
Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection
programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems
and a gargantuan new “mission data repository” in Utah. According to
its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed “to cope with the
vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the
global network.”
Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American
Civil Liberties Union, said history suggests that “over the next couple
of years they will expand to more countries, retain data longer and
expand the secondary uses.”
Spokesmen for the NSA and the Office of Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper declined to confirm or deny expansion plans
or discuss the criteria for any change.
Based on RETRO’s internal reviews, the NSA has strong motive to
deploy it elsewhere. In the documents and interviews, U.S. officials
said RETRO is uniquely valuable when an analyst first uncovers a new
name or telephone number of interest.
With up to 30 days of recorded conversations in hand, the NSA can
pull an instant history of the subject’s movements, associates and
plans. Some other U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to RETRO.
Highly classified briefings cite examples in which the tool offered
high-stakes intelligence that would not have existed under traditional
surveillance programs in which subjects were identified for targeting in
advance. Unlike most of the government’s public claims about the value
of controversial programs, the briefings supply names, dates, locations
and fragments of intercepted calls in convincing detail.
Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that
large numbers of conversations involving U.S. citizens would be
gathered from the country where RETRO operates.
The NSA does not attempt to filter out their calls, defining them as
communications “acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed
against appropriate foreign intelligence targets.”
Until about 20 years ago, such incidental collection was unusual
unless a U.S. citizen was communicating directly with a foreign
intelligence target. In bulk collection systems, which are exponentially
more capable than the ones in use throughout the Cold War, calls and
other data from U.S. citizens and permanent residents are regularly
ingested by the millions.
Under the NSA’s internal “minimization rules,” those intercepted
communications “may be retained and processed” and included in
intelligence reports. The agency generally removes the names of U.S.
callers, but there are several broadly worded exceptions.
An independent group tasked by the White House to review U.S.
surveillance policies recommended that incidentally collected U.S. calls
and emails – including those obtained overseas – should nearly always
“be purged upon detection.” Obama did not accept that recommendation.
Vines, in her statement, said the NSA’s work is “strictly conducted under the rule of law.”
RETRO and MYSTIC are carried out under Executive Order 12333, the
traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for
operations outside the United States.
Since August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on that panel have been
working on plans to assert a greater oversight role for intelligence
gathering abroad. Some legislators are now considering whether Congress
should also draft new laws to govern those operations.
Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.
“Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence collection is not
regulated by any statute passed by Congress,” said Timothy H. Edgar, the
former director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama’s national
security staff. “There’s a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but that’s only a slice of
what the intelligence community does.”
All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate
intelligence purpose, he said, but that “still leaves a gap for
activities that otherwise basically aren’t regulated by law because
they’re not covered by FISA.”
Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on
domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed U.S.
territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of
U.S. citizens and residents whose calls and emails now routinely cross
international borders.
Vines noted that the NSA’s job is to “identify threats within the
large and complex system of modern global communications,” where
ordinary people share fiber-optic cables with legitimate intelligence
targets.
For Peter Swire, a member of the president’s review group, the fact
that U.S. citizens and foreigners use the same devices, software and
networks calls for greater care to safeguard privacy.
“It’s important to have institutional protections so that advanced
capabilities used overseas don’t get turned against our democracy at
home,” he said.
© 2014, The Washington Post/http://www.ticotimes.net
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