A Legal and Law Enforcement Guide to Telephony;Addressing Technical, Legal and Police Issues Relating to the Interface and Interaction with Communication Service Providers

The goal of this book is to provide legal and law enforcement practitioners with factual, informative, and easy-to-understand information about telephone company inner workings, their networks, and operation. The range of subjects includes local, long distance, and cellular services; private phone systems (PBX and KTS); E-911 systems; telephone fraud; pay phones; customer premises wiring; and new technologies including Voice over the Internet (VoIP). Telephone calls, like people, leave fingerprints known as call records for virtually every call that passes through the telephone network. These fingerprints are useful to law enforcement, aiding in reconstructing events and tracking the movement of individuals. Although competition in the local, long distance, and cellular industries has increased the need to generate a greater volume of call records, the typical subpoena does not result in an exhaustive discovery. Many telephone company personnel are unaware that some of these records exist, where they are, or how to find them. Unlike investigations where trained law enforcement specialists look for and gather evidence, law enforcement agencies are dependent on telephone company personnel to look for and gather call records. Armed with the knowledge presented here, investigators will be prepared to probe the inner workings of telephone companies guiding the search for evidence.