Say It with Roses (Not Txt Msgs)The courts often become the forum of choice when new technologies cause old interests to collide. The advent of text messaging is no exception. The U.S. Supreme Court decided last week to review City of Ontario v. Quon, a case from a federal appeals court in California. Presumably, the high court wants to help us sort out how text messaging in the workplace might figure into legal principles that protect our privacy — specifically, those embedded in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, designed to prevent unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. The gist of the case is as follows: Some municipal workers were supplied by the city with alphanumeric pagers that function much like text messaging on cell phones. The city had a general policy that forbade personal use of computer equipment, but a supervisor told the workers that they could use the pagers for personal texts — and the texts would not be audited. The employees, though, were expected to reimburse the city for extra charges if the monthly allotment of messages exceeded the city's service plan. That happened, but the workers were slow in ponying up. So the city to asked the private service provider for information from which it could sort out who owed what for which texts unrelated to public business. Some of the messages were found to contain sexually explicit content. The matter was referred for investigation and possible discipline. The workers and recipients of the texts sued, claiming that the city audit violated their Fourth Amendment rights.
The ruling might be non-controversial were it not for the fact that the municipal employees were police officers, members of a SWAT team. Their pagers were intended for use in police emergencies. The employees had signed acknowledgments that noted that the city reserved the right to "monitor and log all network activity including e-mail and Internet use" and that "users should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when using these resources." The content of the messages almost certainly were public records under California law. And here's the kicker: One of the officers had sent or received an average of 28 messages per shift during the month under audit. All but a few were personal. Some were sexually explicit — including those to his wife, a former police department employee, and to his mistress, a police dispatcher. Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick found out the hard way that texts matter. He used city equipment for 14,000 text messages between him and his female chief of staff — before he was convicted of obstruction of justice and ousted from office. The California SWAT team matter also probably will prove to be a similarly poor test case for protecting individual privacy rights in the digital age. Rules of thumb (no pun intended) when it comes to text messaging, meanwhile, are easy to remember: If you're using a company cell phone, assume the boss is looking over your shoulder. If you're intent not just on misbehaving but living dangerously, just update and heed the great Jimmy Durante's advice from a different age: "Say it with roses. Say it with mink. But never, ever say it in ink." REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
