NSA can store a billion cell phone calls each day

In a new revelation, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald has said that the U.S. government has the ability to store one billion phone calls each day.

Greenwald, who earlier this month revealed about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, said on Friday night that the U.S. spying agency has “a brand new technology” enabling it to gather such massive information every day.

Greenwald was speaking via Skype to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. His information comes from classified documents leaked to him by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"But what we're really talking about here is a localized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without its being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency," Greenwald said.

"It doesn't mean that they're listening to every call, it means they're storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time, and it does mean that they're collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records," he added.

Snowden’s leak has sparked a scandal in America and made the Obama administration to react furiously.

A bipartisan group of Senators has now written a letter addressed to the director of national intelligence warning that the Obama administration is using a “secret body of law” to justify collecting massive amounts of data on U.S. citizens.

"We are concerned that by depending on secret interpretations of the PATRIOT Act that differed from an intuitive reading of the statute, this program essentially relied for years on a secret body of law," the letter reads.

The 26 senators accused administration officials of making “misleading” statements to the public about how the law is being interpreted.