I think that Snowden is grasping for relevance

[Adam]

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

The 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.

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.

For me, this mostly gets a big yawn.

We've all heard for years, decades about ECHELON. How much of that which we have heard is truth and how much of it is urban legend is probably up for some debate, but one way or the other, this strikes me as old news. When I read the headline, my knee-jerk thought was "well, of course they do!"

What this does tell me, though, is that Snowden is probably scraping the bottom of the barrel now. He made a big to-do about announcing that there were heaps and heaps of other stuff that he has yet to release (or, more specifically, that he was going to let the media dribble out at their discretion). And yet this is the next big "bombshell?" What's next? Is he going to tell us that the CIA has spies all around the globe?

Sounds to me like Snowden has shot his bolt now, and is running out of things to keep himself relevant and in the news.

[Gramps]

Why should we even care?

Better yet, shouldn't we be applauding it?

[Adam]

Why should we even care?

Better yet, shouldn't we be applauding it?

That's pretty much the point.