Supreme Court of the United States; phot credit: Laura Padgett

The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear its first privacy rights case involving text messages, the Court announced yesterday. The case presents the question of whether government employees are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy when they send personal text messages on electronic devices provided by their employers.

Jeff Quon, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif. SWAT team, successfully sued the City of Ontario for a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to privacy when his superior officer ordered transcripts of and reviewed messages sent by Quon and some of his colleagues on their government-issued pagers. The superior officer wanted to determine what proportion of his employees’ text message usage was personal versus professional; although there was an informal policy of allowing personal use of the devices, officially the police department maintained a no-privacy policy. A majority of Quon’s text messages were personal and many were of a sexually explicit nature, but he was not disciplined in any way for this use of his pager.

The City of Ontario is appealing the decision on the grounds that notwithstanding any informal policy, Quon did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy because the police department’s official policy explicitly states that the department “reserves the right to monitor and log all network activity including e-mail and Internet use, with or without notice.”

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures” by government representatives. The case law of the United States Courts has, over the years, established that so long as an individual can justifiably expect that his or her conversation would remain private, then that conversation is protected by the Fourth Amendment from “unreasonable searches.”

The Supreme Court, wrote Adam Liptak in The New York Times, “has given public employers wide latitude to search their employees’ offices and files. But it has also said that the Fourth Amendment has a role to play in any analysis of that latitude.” Sergeant Quon successfully argued in the lower court case that his employer’s invasion of his privacy unreasonably violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

The principal significance of the case is that the Supreme Court is addressing Fourth Amendment privacy rights in the context of  modern technology. “Everyone has been watching the Quon case,” Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J., told The Los Angeles Times, “because it is the first involving the new generation of communications technology.”

Notwithstanding the narrow scope of the legal issue – limited, as it is, to government employees in government workplaces with non-privacy policies in place – the Supreme Court’s decision in this case could “hold a blueprint for private-workplace rules in a world in which communication via computers, e-mail and text messages plays a very large role,” Robert Barnes pointed out in The Washington Post.

The case will be heard in April 2010.