Upon viewing the news on the television last week, I heard of how a police department had inspected the personal text messages of one of their officers, sent and received on a government pager, and found that many of his messages were of a sexually explicit nature. This caught my attention, and I found this story rather funny but was it?

It turns out that the Supreme Court has agreed to take this case to determine whether the police department in Ontario, California violated the constitutional privacy rights of Sergeant Quon, a member of the S.W.A.T team. The Supreme Court’s decision will be crucial for future cases of a similar nature since his case will be the first on the Fourth Amendment’s  protection in data networks.

Apparently, the Ontario Police Department had a formal policy reserving the right to monitor network activity including Internet use and emails as well as light personal communications. The policy also stated that its employees should not expect absolute privacy.  However there was nothing in the policy which directly addressed text messages.

Sergeant Quon and some of his messaging compatriots sued the department claiming that the rights of the Fourth Amendment had been violated.

This case is very interesting because both sides of the coin have valid arguments. One can see why the department would feel it is their right to screen their employees’ network activity, especially if the device that that particularly employee is using belongs to the department itself, meaning that any messages sent and received was an added cost to department, unless the employee decided to pay the bill themselves.

However, the employee still has a right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment, therefore where is the line drawn between Federal Law and department policy?  Furthermore, one can’t help but wonder if Sergeant Quon was abusing the department’s generosity. And seeing that this was a government pager, shouldn’t such a device be used for strictly work related activities?

I don’t know all the details of the case but based on the knowledge I have about what transpired, if I were the judge in the Supreme Court ruling on this case, I would probably order Quon to foot the bill for the personal text messages he sent that were not work related, and order The Ontario Police Department to rewrite their data network policy with more strict and specific language to avoid future confusion.

What would your decision be?

Posted by Syddel on December 22, 2009 at 5:05 pm.