The Video:

The Story:

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.

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.

via NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls – The Washington Post.

I tend to believe that this program was going on long before 2009. In fact, Keith Olbermann talked about it on his show.

Here’s the videos:

So, again, I have to ask; why is this news? I knew about this, back when Keith was still on MSNBC. Which proves another theory that I was always believed; that no matter which political party is in office, the government is still big, the government still does stuff, like this here, and no matter what kind of political posturing goes on, stuff like this here, will continue to happen.

This is also why I simply do not much get into partisan politics. The same stuff that went on, during the Bush Administration; is still going on during the Obama Administration.  Hope and Change was nothing more than a political slogan. The Government had no intention on stopping this sort of a thing. All in the name of “National Security” against something that the United States Government created themselves in the first place! (That being terrorism)

The truth is, that if the United States of America had not opened that military base in Saudi Arabia, the towers in NYC would have never been hit. If we kept our noses out of Arab peninsula; we would not be in the place we are now.

Before anyone says it; this is not a liberal blog posting. I am not a Democrat at all. I voted for Bob Barr in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. I voted for John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. I do not vote party, I vote for whom I think can do a better job, than the current person in office. However, I am not a fool. I know how this Government operates and I do not trust it at all. This above, is a classic example of such. I came into this blogging stuff in 2006, as a skeptical left-of-center, knowing full well what happened during the Clinton Administration with the Waco disaster in Texas. I did not trust the Government after that little event and I still do not. Of course, we all know that the Waco siege led to the Oklahoma City bombing.

I will not lie to you; I have been literally on pins and needles, worried that something, like the Oklahoma City bombing, will happen again. Paranoid people, who are scared of their Government, who have access to things, like Timothy McVeigh did; tend to lash out like that. So far, we have been quite lucky that this sort of a thing has not happened again.

I tend to believe that the reason things like that have not happened again, is because of this beautiful thing we call the internet is in place now and with the advent of blogs, and social media; people tend to be more connected and are able to communicate more and are not as isolated. Which tends to make people feel like they are not alone in their feelings about the Government.

Anyhow, back to the point of this posting. The truth is that this Government of ours, has been doing this sort of a thing for a very long time. I tend to believe that the program as described above, has been going on for a very long time. Just under a different name or something to that effect. Anyone who believes anything other than this; is fooling themselves.