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Supreme Court Takes Texting Privacy Case

Posted by Soulskill on from the hi-2-u-juj-scalia dept.

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.'"

2 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Paid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    to go OT...

    There was a case a few years ago where the cops lied to someone under interrogation to get them to confess, by telling them that $actual_real_named_person has identified them as the culprit (which they hadn't done). She wound up dead 24 hours later. Apparently, she didn't have to be offered protection because she hadn't actually provided the police with the evidence.

  2. why is this even in question? by Eil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I heard this on NPR this morning and the fact that they were using the phrase "grey area" astounded me.

    Look, it's simple: if your employer owns a device, and allows you to use it, you are not to ever use it for personal reasons, nor should you ever expect even the slightest amount of privacy for communications using the device. Even (and probably especially) if they give you permission for personal use. That goes for cell phones, pagers, computers, slide rules, everything. That means you do not log into personal Facebook, Google, or Hotmail at work. You do not use the company phone to call home. If you do any of these, you've 1) probably violated the terms of your employment and 2) have given the company/government permission to peer into all personal communications made with your employer's equipment.

    You have explicit rights (in most cases) to privacy and use of the property that you actually own. That's it, the line is drawn there. I can't believe there is any controversy over this.