Remember not so long ago the NSA’s innocent claim that it only collects the metadata of people’s phone calls? Well, apparently that’s not not entirely accurate, for not only does it actually listen into foreigners’ telephone conversations with alarming regularity, it also has the ability to record “every single” call in any given country and store this data for up to 30 days.

That’s the latest claim made by the Washington Post, courtesy of the one and only Ed Snowden. While most security experts would have said that such an operation isn’t feasible, leaked documents show that the NSA has actually been running this program since 2009, under the codename MYSTIC.

A second, related program called RETRO has also been up and running since 2011. A contraction of “retrospective removal”, the program gives the NSA the ability to replay any of its stored phone calls, even if it can’t identify the people making or receiving the call. It’s reported that analysts only bother listening into about one percent of the calls they record, but millions of hours of recordings are stashed away in the NSA’s servers long-term. RETRO was originally designed to be used in just one (unnamed) foreign nation, but according to last year’s secret intelligence budget the NSA is now readying the tool for use in five more countries.

If the NSA really has these capabilities then it’s an obvious breach of American citizen’s privacy, as it seems unthinkable that if the agency can record an entire nation’s phone calls, there wouldn’t be some Americans on the end of the line. Note that this contradicts a statement from President Obama, made shortly after the first Snowden leaks, when he insisted that, “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

Nevertheless, the government continues to insist that this kind of surveillance is necessary, as ugly as it may be. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Washington Post that “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.”

But how many ‘circumstances’ are there really? And where does it end? First it was simply phone call metadata, then we learned that the NSA was also tapping into our SMS messages. Then it was alleged that companies like Google and Microsoft are in cahoots with the NSA, giving them access to all of our emails and instant message conversations. There’s the undersea cable tapping to worry about too, not to mention the NSA’s tentacle-like malware program, and it’s predilection for impersonating Facebook’s servers to spread this.

Sadly, the likeliest answer is that it will never end. Only this week Snowden promised there’s yet more leaks to come, and with each new revelation seemingly worse than the one before, it doesn’t bear thinking about what else they’re doing. As ACLU chief technologist Chris Soghoian told the Washington Post, the NSA seems to have its heart set on expanding its spy capabilities even further.

“Over the next couple of years [the NSA] will expand to more countries, retain data longer and expand the secondary uses,” said Soghoian.

Big Brother, here we come.

Main image credit: nolifebeforecoffee via photopin cc; documents courtesy of The Washington Post