Can anyone explain whether or not this tweet from the creator of McAfee security makes any sense?

Yeah. It's legit.

The carrier software also has these features. It can be backdoored by a bogus tower (microcell), or simply through the carrier's network using their pre-authorized API. The NSA records every telephone call made in, to or from the US. The carriers have to agree to this to get radio spectrum, landline providers are covered under legacy agreements. Other agencies are responsible for foreign countries. Frequently the foreign service's technology provider's hardware, software or both is compromised at the design or manufacture stages, but sometimes when it isn't the equipment is intercepted and compromised while in transit or even after delivery.

Transcripts are automatically generated, indexed and keyword searchable and the audio and text are never deleted. In some cases voice recognition is used to ID participants, though that is a compute intensive task that cannot be applied to every call.

And of course all of this is highly classified and nobody is ever going to admit it. They don't use it for simple criminal matters. It's tapped when there is a major event and they need to unwind somebody's life up to the time of the event mostly, or when they're hunting very poorly trained and managed spies. It is useless as courtroom evidence because of course they can't admit it exists.

It requires remarkably little storage space to store telephone quality audio. It is eminently compressible. Using SPEEX, about 1 MB/hour, so a 12 TB HDD would store 12 million hours of audio.

/r/technology Thread