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Telephone tapping is officially strictly controlled in many countries to safeguard an individual's privacy; this is the case in all developed democracies. In theory, Telephone tapping often needs to be authorised by a court, and is, again in theory, normally only approved when evidence shows it is not possible to detect criminal or subversive activity in less intrusive ways; often the law and regulations require that the crime investigated must be at least of a certain severity. In practice however, permission for Telephone tapping is easily obtained on a routinely basis without further investigation by the court or other entity granting such permission. Illegal or unauthorised telephone tapping by the public is often a criminal offence. However, in certain jurisdictions such as Germany, courts will accept illegally recorded phone calls without the other party's consent as evidence.
In the United States, federal agencies may be authorized to engage in wiretaps by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a court with secret proceedings, in certain circumstances.
Generally, there is nothing illegal about one of the parties to a telephone call recording the conversation, or giving permission for calls to be recorded or permitting their telephone line to be tapped. However, some jurisdictions impose that the other party gives its consent to the recording; or they may require that a warning may be broadcast prior to and/or during the recording. Within that framework, many businesses record their telephone calls for legal reasons, so that they can prove what was said, train their staff, or monitor performance. This activity is not normally considered telephone tapping in some jurisdictions because it is done with the knowledge of at least one of the parties to the telephone conversation. Some businesses and other organizations even ask if a conversation can be recorded.
The contracts or licenses by which the state controls telephone companies means that the companies must provide access for tapping lines to the security services and the police.
When telephone exchanges were mechanical, a tap had to be installed by technicians, linking circuits together to route the audio signal from the call. Now that many exchanges are being converted to digital technology installing taps is far simpler, and can be done by installing small plugs, or even by computer. Telephone services provided by cable TV companies are tapped in a similar way.
Unless the tap has been very badly installed, it is not possible to tell if your line is being tapped or not. The noises that some people believe to be telephone taps are really just noise created by the induction of signals from other phone lines. Because the tap is made at the exchange it is very difficult to tell if the line is tapped because there will be no appreciable difference in volume. But irrespective of the tapping of content, communications data will always be collected automatically, and stored for later use by the billingIn Norse mythology, Billing was the father of Rind. Joseph Billings was an English explorer. See Joseph Billings for more detail. A city named Billings, Montana, USA exists. See Billings, Montana for more details. The process of sending accounts to custom department of your phone company or the security services.
In addition to making billing information available to the security services, which contains details such as the numbers called from a certain phone line as well as the duration of these calls, the security services can also acquire information on which numbers called the monitored phone line and the duration of these calls. A Telephone tap during which only the former information is recorded but not the contents of the phone calls themselves, is called a Pen Register tap.
For telephone services run via digital exchanges, the information collected may additionally include a log of the type of communications media being used (some services treat data and voice communications differently to conserve bandwidth).