The latest post on the official Yahoo! Messenger blog appears to be out of place to me (http://www.ymessengerblog.com/blog/2008/01/04/recording-yahoo-messenger-calls/). It is not part of the usual suspects of promising unneeded features or unabashed promotion of Messenger. Instead it is a fairly useful commentary on how to record a Messenger phone session using third party applications. The Yahoo! Messenger blog references a New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/technology/personaltech/03ASKK-002.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) where a user asked if there is a way to record Messenger phone calls.

While most of the people will look at this piece and say how cool, I looked at it and asked the question, “is this legal?” I do not know exactly how VoIP correlates to traditional phone service, I do know that there are some fairly stringent laws on the books in the US about wiretapping. I decided to do a little research and find out if you are in danger if you use any recording program to record Yahoo! Messenger phone conversations.
In the US the law defines two cases. If you are not one of the parties involved in the conversation then listening or recording a telephone conversation is considered wiretapping and you will go to jail. The other possibility is to be one of the parties of the conversation which is most likely the case when you are using a tool described in the Messenger blog. I found out that on the federal level it is completely legal to record a telephone conversation even if the other person does not know about the recording. It is certainly courtesy to let the other party know that they are being recorded but it will not get you thrown in jail. With this comes with a few strings. Several states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington) do have a law against recording someone without their knowledge and when the telephone call takes place in one of these states you have to notify the other party. From what I have read this is usually not a big deal but you should still be aware of the law.

Given the bigger picture this is not that big of a deal to me. I don’t think anyone shouldn’t be able to sleep at night over breaking this law if it even exists in your state. The big surprise to me is that the manager of Messenger spent so much time talking about a third part application that most likely breaks the Messenger Terms of Service and produces no revenue for Yahoo! In the end I did learn something new and perhaps you will too.

http://www.rcfp.org/taping/http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiretapping