We now know exactly what happened. NSA will have the tapes.

[Egnever]

33. There is a big difference between call data and recording

The idea of transcribing and then storing seems much more probable but even then the resources required to transcribe every single call made would be enormous.

From one of your links


Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. And there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.


I am certainly not the computer expert in this sort of thing but I do understand data and the size of data. All voice calls would be an enormous amount of data even transcribed. And cloud storage does not equal unlimited it just means someone else provides the storage.

I certainly do not know enough to declare with certainty that it can't be done but I find it very difficult to believe.

You would have to have a point of capture which would not likely go directly through the Utah facility as it is In the center of the country which means that data would have to be transferred to the Utah facility which would be again an enormous amount of traffic and then once collected it would have to be stored which again if it was all calls going in and out of the US would be hundreds if not thousand of gigabytes of data a minute.

The articles you linked we're based on Snowden stuff a lot of which was wish list stuff.

One of the articles does mention that it was used on a foreign country but does not mention what country. It could be a tiny country...

Maybe they have figured out a way to pull off that amount of data collection again I am not knowledgeable enough to say that they can't.

I am highly skeptical however.