U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Workplace Privacy Rights

Supreme Court Decision: Ontario v. Quon
6/17/2010

U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Workplace Privacy Rights Claim For Police Officers, Public Employees In Text Messages, Emails

WASHINGTON, DC — In a unanimous ruling in City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the search of a police officer's personal messages on a government-owned pager, saying it did not violate his constitutional rights. 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, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute had urged 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 court's ruling is available at www.supremecourt.gov.

"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. "Unfortunately, the Court's decision undermines this important Fourth Amendment principle by allowing government employers to evade these constitutional protections."

The case before the Court arose from an audit of pager text messages undertaken by the City of Ontario's 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."

In reversing the Ninth's Circuit ruling, the Supreme Court noted that it had purposely avoided a broader ruling about employees' expectations of privacy when using equipment provided by their employers because of rapid and unpredictable changes in technology.