Supreme Court Takes Texting Privacy Case

TaggartAleslayer writes with this excerpt from the NYTimes: "The Supreme Court agreed on 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, Calif., SWAT team. ... 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 eventually 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 456 of those messages were related to official business. According to the trial judge, many of the messages 'were, to say the least, sexually explicit in nature.'"

Oh wait, what? This again?

[Xaositecte]

An organization has the right to inspect how its resources are being used? Madness!

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

My employer has no specific policy against personal internet usage but that doesn't mean that I'm going to use my company workstation to send sexually explicit "fuck me!" messages to my girlfriend.

You just did.
See you after work, hon. ;)

Re:Oh wait, what? This again?

[MadnessASAP]

Anybody who knew of rule 1 wouldn't have been able to tell him then would they?