cisco ip phone system: can calls be recorded/monitored?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. the company i work for (which employs about 500 employees) is in the process of getting a new cisco ip telephone system. the phones are 7940s and they are plugged into powered panels. i was wondering if the phone system is possible of allowing people to monitor and/or record conversations without the person knowing. i have done some research on the web and found that the "call center" product(s) are capable of it. we are not, however, a call center, but just a regular company. im concerned that this is happening illegally and i want to know if its even possible (from a technical standpoint) before i approach my boss.

A. There are two freeware unix-based products I'm aware of called RTPScan and Vomit. The author of the RTPScan pulled his website and the program had a few minor flaws, but I used it to record calls as part of security invesigations (usually with search warrant). It worked well at the gateway as it seperated calls into individual sound files. I also tried the vomit program and found it functional although it couldn't distinguishing between seperate calls. Obviously these programs require the PC to see all of the traffic, which implies using dumb hubs, port spanning on switches, or some other network setup. I suppose its possible with arp poisoning or flooding, but thats much more elaborate and would likely interfere with the voice traffic. Note that the Cisco phones present all of the data on the integral PC network port. This makes it real easy to record conversations to that phone from an attached PC. Some people have reported that they can't reproduce this, so it may be firmware specific. Check out the laws in both your state and the state where the calls originate as the courts frequently enforce the more restrictive of the two. Best bet is have all employees sign off that they are subject to monitoring and have your incoming greeting state the same.

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