Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I think it would if the defense got the right lawyer.
Example:
Your direct supervisor tells you, you can go home early, no need for you today.
You leave.
For one reason or another, HIS supervisor felt you shouldn't have left and fires you.
I'm pretty sure with the right lawyer one can argue, you had a reasonable expectation that it was okay for you to leave and not suffer the consequences, despite what the policy and your supe's supe said.
This isn't really any different, if your superior says its okay for you to do something, and someone over his head comes down on you for it, you have a defense.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
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.