December 14, 2009

"Splitless and factbound."

I.e., not certworthy, but the the Supreme Court took cert in the text messaging called Quon.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 3:39 PM
Tags: , , , ,

4 comments:

Bissage said...

There must be some mistake. Quon was the guy who tended bar on Deep Space Nine.

12/14/09, 4:24 PM
traditionalguy said...

This case begs for a wise Hispanic to set us straight on privacy rights in the digital device world we are inhabiting all day long. Somebody needs some wisdom, and this seems to be the perfect case to make snooping illegal. Or they could make snooping always legal. The trouble is that without Sandra Day O'Connor,there is no one left good enough to punt the decision back to lower courts on a balancing of all of the interests all the time test.

12/14/09, 4:28 PM
Joe said...

A guy sent text messages on or to a device owned by someone else and that someone else looked at what he was doing. That he complained makes him one of the dumbest people on earth. In this case, the city should have fired him outright for being so stupid.

(Since when is "my boss said I could" a valid excuse? Besides common sense, just about everywhere I've worked, I've had to sign a document saying I agreed to abide by the rules of the workplace.)

12/14/09, 4:41 PM
Chase said...

The officers operated under the following informal policy

Members of the department’s SWAT team were given pagers and told they were responsible for charges in excess of 25,000 characters a month. Under an informal policy adopted by a police lieutenant, those who paid the excess charges themselves would not have their messages inspected.

The lieutenant eventually changed his mind and ordered transcripts of messages sent and received by Sgt. Jeff Quon.

Informal or not, the policy was well known and practiced. Going back and checking those texts without warning is a violation of policy, informal or not. In this specific case - and only this case - a reasonable expectation of privacy was enforced by the "informal" policy. And that is where it should stand.

Sign me, "a former employer with 260 hours of Employment Law Seminars in the State of California."

12/14/09, 8:54 PM

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