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Supreme Court Takes Texting Privacy Case
TaggartAleslayer writes with this excerpt from the NYTimes:
"The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a government pager. The case opens 'a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,' according to a three-judge panel of an appeals court that ruled in favor of the employee, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif., SWAT team. ... 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 456 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.'"
Normally I'd agree with you, but the summary says they are explicitly allowed personal use and were told that the messages wouldn't be read.
From the article...
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.” The policy did not, however, directly address text messages.
Ave Molech Setting
He's a cop, he must know rule number 2:
2. Never believe a word a cop says.
Almost as important as rule number 1:
1. Never talk to the police.
1. The official policy of the organization, that there was no expectation of privacy, has never been in question, and has never changed.
2. A middle manager (The Lieutenant) made an unofficial policy that the text messages wouldn't be inspected.
3. The inspection was not made simply because it was an organizational resource, it was made because the officer in sergeant in question was overusing his phone, and they wanted to find out why.
The policy department as a whole never made any statements or policy that this was acceptable. The organization is not going back on it's word. The lieutenant in question is kind of an asshole for this, but he's not in the wrong legally.
This case is going to hinge on a lot of details that we don't have.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The year is 2002, not 2009. SMS was not very prevalent at the time, and inter-provider SMS was still occasionally glitchy. That was the time of dedicated alphanumeric pagers waning in popularity while the 'cool kids who wanted to be like the drug dealers' were discovering SMS on their phones.