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Supreme Court: Employers Can Search Texts

by Amar Toor on June 18, 2010 at 07:25 AM

Supreme CourtBack in December, we told you about a group of police officers in Ontario, California, who filed a lawsuit against their chief because he read scandalous text messages they sent on city-provided pagers. Now, nearly seven months later, the Supreme Court has weighed in (in spite of their technological ignorance), and have come down in favor of the snooping police chief.

The court's unanimous decision, according to the AP, reverses an earlier federal appeals court ruling that sided with the officers, but likely won't have broader legal implications for worker privacy rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that Sgt. Jeff Quon, the superior who read the racy texts sent by his officers, had no reason to assume that the messages he read "were in all circumstances immune from scrutiny.'' Quon discovered the text messages during an audit that the department undertook to see if any SWAT team members were using the company pagers for personal use. As it turns out, many were using it for their own correspondence, and some of that correspondence contained sexually explicit exchanges.

Justice Kennedy added that the court intentionally abstained from issuing a general ruling on employee expectations of privacy when using company gadgets, due to the constantly changing state of contemporary technology. Kennedy's justification is probably realistic, and considering the likelihood that any blanket ruling would likely be modified within a few years, it may very well be for the better. But isn't the Supreme Court suppose to issue these kinds of rulings? Maybe the Justices were too worn out after wrapping their minds around the concept of a text message, or maybe we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that the U.S. judicial system is too slow to keep pace with technology. But we still can't help but think that the Court just missed a golden opportunity to provide some clear, firm guidelines on an issue that remains clouded in legal obscurity. [From: NPR/AP]

Tags: anthony kennedy, AnthonyKennedy, cellphones, law, privacy, supreme court, SupremeCourt, texting, texts, top

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