WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed 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 SWAT team.
Orin Kerr, an authority on the Fourth Amendment at George Washington University’s law school, said the case was simultaneously significant and idiosyncratic. “This is the first case on Fourth Amendment protection in data networks,” Kerr said. But the case arose from unusual circumstances, making it likely that the eventual Supreme Court ruling will be narrow.
The Supreme Court has given public employers wide latitude to search their employees’ offices and files. But it has also said that the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable government searches, has a role to play.
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 later 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.
Quon and some of the people with whom he messaged sued, saying their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.
