I blogged about City of Ontario v. Quon a few days ago, and I want to raise another important issue in the case, one my colleague Orin Kerr has astutely pointed out. The case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme from the 9th Circuit: Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., Inc., 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008). The case involves whether employees at a police department have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their text message communications made from pagers while on the job. In my previous post, I addressed this issue, which involves how to interpret the city’s monitoring policy (it had a general written policy for computer use but a set of informal practices for texting that were different).
