CDT Sees Silver Lining In Court Ruling
June 17, 2010
| 7:42 PM
The Center for Democracy and Technology found a silver lining in the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday that a California police department's search of an officer's text messages was constitutional.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Ontario, Calif. v. Quon that the Ontario Police Department's decision to read the text messages of officer Jeff Quon to determine if he was using his department-issued pager for personal use was reasonable and did not violate his constitutional rights.
CDT said the case was significant in that the high court chose not to weaken individual privacy rights. "The case could have had very far-reaching implications," CDT said in a news release.
Using a precedent set by a 1987 ruling, the court noted that government employees "generally retain their Fourth Amendment privacy rights, and it assumed that government employees may have a reasonable expectation of privacy even in communications they send during work hours on employer-issued devices," CDT said.
CDT Vice President of Public Policy Jim Dempsey said, "This ended up as a workplace privacy case for government employees. The message to government employers is that the courts will continue to scrutinize employers' actions for reasonableness, so supervisors have to be careful."
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