This section does not address legal obligations for the implementation of lawful intercept. As a service
provider, you are responsible to ensure that your network complies with applicable lawful intercept
statutes and regulations. We recommend that you seek legal advice to determine your obligations.

Lawful Intercept Overview

Lawful intercept is a process that enables a Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) to perform electronic
surveillance on an individual (a target) as authorized by a judicial or administrative order. To facilitate
the lawful intercept process, certain legislation and regulations require service providers (SPs) and
Internet service providers (ISPs) to implement their networks to explicitly support authorized electronic
surveillance.

The surveillance is performed through the use of wiretaps on traditional telecommunications and
Internet services in voice, data, and multiservice networks.

The LEA delivers a request for a wiretap to the target’s service provider, who is responsible for
intercepting and for channeling Intercept Related Information (IRI) (for example, events and signal
information), and Content of Communication (CC) (the voice, video, or messages contents) to and from
the individual. The service provider uses the target’s IP address or session to determine which of its edge
routers handles the target’s traffic (data communication).

The service provider then intercepts the target’s traffic as it passes through the router, and sends a copy
of the intercepted traffic to the LEA without the target’s knowledge.

The Lawful Intercept feature supports the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement
Act (CALEA), which describes how service providers in the United States must support lawful intercept.
Currently, lawful intercept is defined by 3GPP TS 33.108.

For information about the Cisco lawful intercept solution, contact your Cisco account representative.

Lawful intercept provides the following benefits: