An intercept system provides more effective and more efficient compliance with legal intercept warrants. The intercept system can provide any combination of operations that include near-real-time intercept, capture of intercepted data in structured authenticated form, clear text intercept for communications where there is access to encryption keys, cipher text intercept for communications where there is no access to encryption keys, provision of transactional logs to the authorized agency, interception without altering the operation of the target services, and encryption of stored intercepted information.