§ 123.003.Defense

The operational defence, and it is bounded on both sides.

A switchboard operator or an officer, employee, or agent of a communication common carrier whose facilities are used in the transmission may intercept, disclose, or use a communication in the normal course of employment where engaged in an activity that is necessary to service or for the protection of the carrier’s rights or property.

Three conditions must all hold. The person must be within the listed roles; the conduct must be in the normal course of employment; and it must be necessary to service or to protecting the carrier.

"Necessary" is a real limit, not a synonym for useful. Listening in to diagnose a fault on the line is necessary to service; listening because a customer is disliked is not.

The protection-of-rights limb covers investigating fraud and theft of service, which a carrier cannot detect without examining traffic on its own network.

The prohibition that follows is the section’s most important sentence: a communication common carrier may not use service observation or random monitoring except for mechanical or service quality control checks.

Service observation is the systematic listening a carrier could otherwise justify as routine, and this closes it off except for the narrow technical purpose named.

The exception is about the line, not the conversation. Quality control asks whether the connection works, not what was said on it.

Subsections (b) and (c) set the procedure. Conduct permitted by the section is a defense to an action, and a defendant must establish it by a preponderance of the evidence.

The burden sits with the defendant, which is the right allocation — the carrier knows why its people were listening.