"What you say may be used against you in a court of law" has a most interesting twist when it comes to VoIP.
New York Law Journal delves into the legal implications of VoIP for corporations. A VoIP network may "unexpectedly" create a substantial quantity of stored information that could become the target of a discovery request. Add in how voice messages can be stored under a unified communications/unified messaging system, then backed up and there's plenty of room for an inquisitive and tech-savvy legal team to go digging.
Call recording also makes life interesting. Contact centers routinely record conversations for quality assurance purposes and analytics processing. Regulatory requirements in the financial and health care industries mandate call recording, so there's a lot of raw information being spooled out to hard disk.
However, processing through stored call information may not be trivial. Searches may be limited to caller ID information, recipient and date and time of call, but more sophisticated data mining to process speech requires someone to pick up the tab. Speech-to-text may provide a more rapid way to skim through massive amounts of audio data rather than the classic but cumbersome method of listening calls and/or having them transcribed for search.
For more
- New York Law Journal discusses legal
implications of VoIP [1]
Related article:
VoIP Befuddles Lawful
Intercept [2]
Links:
[1] http://www.law.com/jsp/nylj/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202422620063
[2] http://www.fierceenterprisecommunications.com/story/voip-befuddles-lawful-intercept/2008-05-18