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"                      <p class=\"imgtitle\">U.S. Supreme Court building</p>           WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline)-The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case that will decide whether employees' text message sent by devices owned by their employer are private.<br /><br />The case specifically will examine whether a California police department violated the constitutional rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages -- some of which were sexually explicit -- sent and received by a pager owned by the city of Ontario, Calif. <br /><br />The case could have broad implications for employee privacy rights.<br /><br />The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the police officer, Sgt. Jeff Quon, had a reasonable expectation of privacy.<br /><br />The appeals court found that the police chief's decision to read the pager's text messages without a suspicion of wrongdoing violated the officer's 4th Amendment constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.<br /> <br />Quon said he and other officers on the SWAT team were told by a superior they could use their pagers so long as they paid out of their pockets if they used more than 25,000 characters per month.<br /><br />U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Larson in Riverside, Calif., rejected the city's motion to dismiss Quon's case before trial.<br /> <br />\"What are the legal boundaries of an employee's privacy in this interconnected, electronic-communication age, one in which thoughts and ideas that would have been spoken personally and privately in ages past are now instantly text-messaged to friend and family via <br />hand-held, computer-assisted electronic devices?\" the judge ruled.<br /><br />The case is City of Ontario v. Quon, No. 08-1332.<br /><br /><i>From Legal Newsline: Reach staff reporter Chris Rizo at <a href=\"mailto:chrisrizo@legalnewsline.com\">chrisrizo@legalnewsline.com.</a></i><br />"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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