Labor & Employment Law

Employee may proceed with claim based on unauthorized access to e-mail

A city employee who alleged that the mayor, the municipality and an IT technician read and forwarded emails from her professional email account to the mayor?s account without authorization could proceed with her state law invasion of privacy claim, a federal trial court in Illinois ruled. The employee, who was also an elected city commissioner, had her city email configured so that it could be forwarded to her personal account.

Around the time she ran for and lost a mayoral campaign, the employee realized she was not receiving all of her work-related email in her personal account. Upon further investigation, she discovered that her ?sent? folder contained emails from her city account that had been forwarded to the mayor. The mayor argued that under Illinois law he had the authority to examine and inspect all ?records? of any municipal employee or officer.

Although the court acknowledged that the definition of ?records? included ?digitized electronic material,? or email, it found this law did not give a mayor ?carte blanche access to use the records for his own use.?

Because the mayor did not access the employee?s email for any official purpose, but rather for his own personal gain, and the employee sufficiently alleged that the emails were intended to be private, the court refused to dismiss the employee?s intrusion upon seclusion claim. The plaintiff?s Stored Communications Act claim also survived a motion to dismiss. However, claims alleging violations of the Federal Wiretap Act were dismissed as time-barred; moreover, the court held the employee failed to allege a civil violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Steinbach v Village of Forest Park, NDIll, July 14, 2009).

Mitchell H. Rubinstein

Full post as published by New York Public Personnel Law on August 26, 2009 (boomark / email).