U.S. Supreme Court hears case involving public employees' expectation of privacy in text messages sent from government-owned, hand-held device 

For the first time, the U.S Supreme Court will rule on a case relating to public employees' expectation of privacy in text messages sent from hand-held electronic devices. The case was argued before the Court on April 19, 2010. 

In City of Ontario v. Quon, 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008), cert. granted, 77 US 3619 (2009), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights were violated when a police chief conducted a search of text messages sent from a city-owned, city-issued pager. The appellee's petition for rehearing before the entire panel of judges in the Ninth Circuit was denied.

In Quon, the court found the plaintiff, a SWAT team member, had a reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages sent from his pager, despite the city's written email and computer use policy that stated no expectation of privacy shall attach to use of such resources. In addition to that policy, an informal policy established by the police lieutenant in charge of pagers provided that messages would not be audited so long as the employee paid any overage fees.

The court then found the search of the employee's text messages was unreasonable. Although the search was conducted pursuant to a legitimate work-related purpose – to ensure officers were not being required to pay for work-related expenses – the scope of the search was unreasonable.

The court found the search was unreasonably intrusive in light of the purpose and that less intrusive means were available to carry out this objective. For example, the police department could have offered the employee a chance to redact the text messages before determining whether the use exceeded any usage content limits.