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9th Cir.: Police officer had reasonable expectation of privacy in text messages on city rented two-way pager

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

The Ninth Circuit holds that police officer's text messages on city rented two-way pagers were subject to a reasonable expectation of privacy for alleged personal use after the city warned the officers that it would look at messages to determine why the number of text messages was so high and expensive. The city told officers that if they paid for personal messages, there would be no audit of the message usage. Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 12766 (9th Cir. June 18, 2008): Our Internet jurisprudence is instructive. In United States v. Forrester, we held that "e-mail ... users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from addresses of their messages ... because they should know that this information is provided to and used by Internet service providers for the specific purpose of directing the routing of information...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on June 19, 2008 (boomark / email).