NSA can reportedly record every call made in a foreign country

Surveillance system has the capability to store recordings of billions of calls for up to 30 days, according to confidential documents obtained by The Washington Post.

NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.

The National Security Agency has the capability to record "100 percent" of the telephone calls placed in a foreign country and play them back up to a month later, according to a report Tuesday by The Washington Post.

Known as MYSTIC, the surveillance system dates back to 2009, according to documents supplied to the newspaper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The program, which wasn't fully operational until 2011, intercepts and records and stores billions of calls for 30 days on a rolling buffer that purges the oldest recordings as new ones arrive, according to one classified summary cited by the newspaper.

The Post said it withheld, at the request of US officials, the identity of the targeted nation and other nations where the program's use was envisioned.

The revelation is just the latest to emerge from a trove of confidential documents leaked to the media by Snowden, detailing the NSA's controversial surveillance programs. Previous revelations showed how the NSA collected metadata associated with phone calls; this program reportedly extends surveillance to the content of conversations.

Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls. Wired magazinedisclosed in 2012 that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas."

The NSA declined to discuss the existence of the MYSTIC recording program but insisted that all of the agency's operations strictly adhere to the rule of law.

"NSA does not conduct signals intelligence collection in any country, or anywhere in the world, unless it is necessary to advance US national security and foreign policy interests and to protect its citizens and the citizens of its allies and partners from harm," NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said in an email.

Civil libertarians said the revelation raised fresh concerns over the NSA's surveillance capabilities.

"This is a truly chilling revelation, and it's one that underscores how high the stakes are in the debate we're now having about bulk surveillance," Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director, said in a statement. "The NSA has always wanted to record everything, and now it has the capacity to do so."

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Security firm RSA took millions from NSA: report

The National Security Agency paid $10 million to the security firm RSA to implement intentionally flawed encryption, according to a new report.

An RSA SecurID key fob

What's an encryption backdoor cost? When you're the NSA, apparently the fee is $10 million.

Intentional flaws created by the National Security Agency in RSA's encryption tokens werediscovered in September, thanks to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It has now been revealed that RSA was paid $10 million by the NSA to implement those backdoors, according to a new report in Reuters.

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Two people familiar with RSA's BSafe software told Reuters that the company had received the money in exchange for making the NSA's cryptographic formula as the default for encrypted key generation in BSafe.

"Now we know that RSA was bribed," said security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been involved in the Snowden document analysis. "I sure as hell wouldn't trust them. And then they made the statement that they put customer security first," he said.

RSA, now owned by computer storage firm EMC Corp, has a long history of entanglement with the government. In the 1990s, the company was instrumental in stopping a government plan to include a chip in computers that would've allowed the government to spy on people.

It has also had its algorithms hacked before, as has RSA-connected VeriSign.

The new revelation is important, Schneier said, because it confirms more suspected tactics that the NSA employs.

"You think they only bribed one company in the history of their operations? What's at play here is that we don't know who's involved," he said.

Other companies that build widely-used encryption apparatus include Symantec, McAfee, and Microsoft. "You have no idea who else was bribed, so you don't know who else you can trust," Schneier said.

In a statement issued Sunday, RSA said it "categorically" denied recent reports.

"We have worked with the NSA, both as a vendor and an active member of the security community. We have never kept this relationship a secret and in fact have openly publicized it," the company said in a statement. "Our explicit goal has always been to strengthen commercial and government security."

The statement goes on to rebut a number of claims, including that the company knowingly introduced a flawed numbers generator into its encryption libraries.

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