Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Textual Healing

SCOTUS takes up a case on privacy rights for personal texts on a government pager which may end up defining internet rights in a much broader sense.  The case is City of Ontario v. Quon:
The Ontario Police Department had a formal policy reserving the right to monitor “network activity including e-mail and Internet use,” allowing “light personal communications” by employees but cautioning that they “should have no expectation of privacy.” It did not directly address text messages.

Members of the department’s SWAT team were given pagers and told they were responsible for charges in excess of 25,000 characters a month. Under an informal policy adopted by a police lieutenant, those who paid the excess charges themselves would not have their messages inspected.

The lieutenant eventually changed his mind and ordered transcripts of messages sent and received by Sgt. Jeff Quon. In one month in 2002, only 57 of more than 450 of those messages were related to official business. According to the trial judge, many of the messages “were, to say the least, sexually explicit in nature.”

Sergeant Quon and some of the people with whom he messaged sued, saying their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, writing for a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said the department’s formal policy had been overridden by the “operational reality” of the lieutenant’s informal policy.
(More after the jump...)


Dissenting from the full Ninth Circuit’s decision not to rehear the case, Judge Sandra S. Ikuta said the panel had violated “the dictates of reason and common sense” and had hobbled “government employers from managing their work forces.”

The City of Ontario and its police department, in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, said “a lower-level supervisor’s informal arrangement” should not be allowed to trump “the employer’s explicit no-privacy policy.”

“It is not objectively reasonable to expect privacy in a message sent to someone else’s workplace pager,” the brief said, “let alone to a police officer’s department-issued pager.”

The Supreme Court’s decision, the brief went on, will affect “a seemingly never-ending stream of new technologies.”
This could end up a huge case.  Just how much of a Fourth Amendment right do you have in your internet communications on company equipment?  Does that include accessing your company accounts on non-company computers, Blackberries or smartphones?  Will the Roberts court acknowledge that internet communications in the workplace have any Fourth Amendment protections at all?

I'll keep an eye on this one.

2 comments:

  1. Oddly enough, I'm kinda on the side of Big Bro in this: if you're using company/government property, they have the right to know how their equipment is being used, and as such you really don't have a right to privacy.

    Of course, I'd rather they lighten up about it's use and worry about actual criminal use, but hey, can't have everything.

    Once it's out of company hands though, off the company network and off company property, the company should shut the fuck up and pretend it didn't happen.

    Basically, I can't say Sgt. Quon is in the right, here, "operational reality" or not. While they were allowed to use the pagers for (light) personal use, but it's still the PD's pager.

    If it had been his private property though, the government has no right to it unless there's something illegal going on that is involving the PD.

    Does that make sense?

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  2. Actually, that makes a hell of a lot of sense, Star.

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