On The Front Lines
Rutherford Institute Urges U.S. Supreme Court to Safeguard Privacy Rights of Police Officers, Public Employees in Text Messages, Emails
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Rutherford Institute has filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, a case involving whether government employees are entitled to any reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace in regards to their emails and text messages. Pointing out that the workplace has increasingly become an extension of the home, where people spend a significant percentage of their lives, undertaking personal as well as work-related tasks, Institute attorneys are urging the Court to recognize that when public employees are given assurances that their communications will remain private under certain circumstances, they retain an expectation of privacy under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.
The Rutherford Institute's amicus brief in City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon is available at here.
"All Americans--whether at home or in the workplace--have a right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, even as it pertains to communications on their pagers, cell phones or other personal devices," stated John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "It is our hope that the Court affirms this important Fourth Amendment principle and recognizes that government employers cannot evade these constitutional protections simply because the electronic medium of communication lends itself more easily to surveillance."
The case before the Court, City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, arises from an audit of pager text messages undertaken by the City of Ontario Police Department in 2002. The audit, initiated after some police officers exceeded their monthly total text character limits, revealed the content of certain personal and sensitive messages. The audit was carried out without the officers' consent, despite the fact that a superior officer had assured one of the officers, Jeff Quon, that so long as he paid any charges for exceeding the monthly character limits, no audit or search of the electronic communications would take place. Insisting that the audit constituted a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, Sergeant Quon filed a civil rights claim against the City.
After a jury ruled in favor of the City, Quon appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court's judgment. The appellate court ruled that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of the text messages by virtue of the assurance that they would remain private if any overage charges were paid by the officer. It also found that the search conducted by the City was "excessively intrusive in light of the noninvestigatory object of the search...[and] based on our conclusion that Quon's reasonable expectation of privacy in those messages was not outweighed by the government's interest."
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