The Court is expected to rule on City of Ontario v. Quon during this session, a case concerning police officers who maintain that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated by an allegedly unreasonable search involving review of text messages they sent and received on city-owned pagers. Although the city has a formal no-privacy policy that extends to messages sent on "City-owned computers and all associated equipment" , the officers were told by their supervisor that they were permitted to use the pagers for personal messages provided that they personally paid any extra cost incurred from those messages. During a standard audit of pager messages in order to determine if the city should pay for an increased character limit on pager messages, city workers discovered sexually-explicit text messages that had been sent when the officers were off-duty. The officers sued the city, alleging an invasion of privacy.
While the Court's opinion will certainly focus on the Fourth amendment issue at stake and reasonable expectations of privacy, I think it's possible that some far-reaching precedents could slip by relatively unnoticed.
This case concerns several technical questions. Is a pager a device similar enough to computers and e-mail systems that it might fall under an "associated" clause? And, more interestingly, does the fact that text messages are sent through a service provider mean that senders have a higher expectation of privacy? The lawyer for the petitioners draws a parallel between the service provider and the U.S. Post Office as a delivery service, maintaining that his clients had a higher expectation of privacy once the messages were entrusted to an intermediary.
It will be interesting to see how the Court rules, especially given the level of technical savvy the Justices presented during oral arguments. Chief Justice Roberts has caught some flak for asking about the "difference between a pager and e-mail?" (He did preface his statement with an admission that "maybe everyone else knows this." )
Personally, while I would love to see the creation of a secure email service that falls under the protection of federal law in the same way that stamped letters are legally shielded from prying eyes, I think that in the current environment, the officers could not reasonably had an expectation of privacy. Texts are easily forwarded in the same way as emails, and I've definitely seen and laughed at way too many emails that were forwarded faaaar beyond their original destinations. (With embarrassing ramifications for the original correspondents--Snopes has a good collection verified as true here.)
Do you expect that your emails and texts will remain private?
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You wrote: "Personally, while I would love to see the creation of a secure email service that falls under the protection of federal law in the same way that stamped letters are legally shielded from prying eyes, I think that in the current environment, the officers could not reasonably had an expectation of privacy." I could not agree more. And yet, it is absolutely important to me that my emails remain private. I suppose that I do expect that they will not be shared -- perhaps I trust overmuch my friends, colleagues, and students. After reading some of the emails on SNOPE, I'm rethinking my position. I can't wrap my head around the psychological distress I'd feel if I'd been exposed the way some of these folks have been. Not to mention their spelling errors. Would I want the world to know that I can't spell the word "hipocrit" (sic)? Never!
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is unusual, but almost every time I send a text or write an e-mail I find myself thinking, "Would I want anyone else to see this?"
ReplyDelete"Online privacy" is an oxy-moron. Nothing online -- absolutely nothing -- is private. It is, after all, the "Internet." It's all about connections, networks, webs of information between us and the rest of the world, and whatever is out there is, for all time, out there. My blog post on Internet vigilantes deals with this issue as well: http://nhmediablog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/the-internet-police-vigilantes-and-governments-take-on-what-seems-to-be-wrongdoing/#comments.
While I support the idea of a federal law to preserve some sort of online privacy, I think the safest thing is to simply use discretion where e-mail is concerned. I’m not sure we’ll ever reach a point where we will have our own, truly private space on the Internet.
Does that sound paranoid?
Coming from Dartmouth, where blitz is monitored and used constantly causing emails to be forwarded around campus or at least to other groups like fraternities and sports teams, I'm forced to be aware that anyone on campus could see anything I send. This seems wrong, but because of the nature of email it seems impossible to avoid this worry. I don't know that it will ever be possible to avoid Snopes-like events, but it may be possible to avoid them in a legal context. I know that email is not shielded like stamped mail, but how are other forms of communication treated? Are they closer to email or snail mail?
ReplyDeleteIf everything is absolutely monitored, I would like to think that I could still use them freely because I have nothing to hide, I am not a criminal. Maybe its a ignorant way to look at all this iffy privacy issues, but rather worry about what others would find out about me, and my flaws, and some secret 'relationships' I may have, I would like to focus on sending the right 'words' I wanted to send to the right person, cause life goes on.
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ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting post and it raises a question about how technology raises many conceptual muddles nowadays that go beyond the context of this court case. I took a class on ethics and the future of computing, and I have come to realize that there are so many new scenarios emerging due to technological developments, thereby leading to policy vacuums. To take a lucid example, think about free music downloading from the internet -- should it be really considered stealing? What is stealing? In the music case, even when we download a song, the song itself still remains accessible to everyone else in the same web-site. So is it really stealing? In this case, we face a conceptual muddle (as James H. Moor's theory defines it) and as a result we have to deal with policy vacuums.
ReplyDeleteConnecting it to the court case, you are right in pointing out that we need to solve the conceptual muddle whether e-mails should be treated as paper mail.
I read a couple of the messages posted on Snopes, and I was horrified. I would be humiliated if I had sent any of those messages and they had been leaked. I HOPE that my emails and texts will be private. But I know that there is always the possibility of having them monitored. Especially after the monitoring incident at Lower Marion, http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html, I have become even more paranoid about the possibility of people reading my emails.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the degree to which emails and texts are protected from the public will increase somewhat as more and more legal cases arise involving privacy. However, due to the Internet’s inherent capabilities, there will be a limit to which emails and texts can be kept private. People simply enjoy reading about others’ behave embarrassingly way too much. Just look at textsfromlastnight.com or fmylife.com. I admit that I’ve spent more than a couple minutes reading other people’s texts.
ReplyDeleteYour post reminded of a term, "human flesh search engine". In China, people are becoming more and more active on the Internet. In recent years, a group of people decided to experiment how much information about a randomly chosen person that you can get from the Internet. The results are pretty astonishing. Some victims of this experiment saw their credit card number, passport number, home address, etc were all posted online by the "human flesh search engine". What's funny is the information above was actually given away by victims on different occasions, which they thought were safe. This experiment leads me to think that we don't really have privacy in the era of Internet, despite the improvement of legislation.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anything is guaranteed to be private. Even when you think that none can see it, there seem to be other ways people find out about it.
ReplyDeleteAs C to the J said, all we can do is spellcheck and think about the content of the message, before we click "send".
I have an Idea!
ReplyDeleteWhat if emails were encrypted like PDFs, so that they could not be copied or edited? Moreover, they could be encoded such that only someone logged into the email account to which the message was addressed could read it. I'm sure it's possible, computer programmers can do most anything these days. Of course, someone can still take a screen shot and send the image file around, but some encryption could avoid most unfortunate forwards.
I'm doubtful that the law can do anything much to seriously regulate the internet. I'm not sure that it would be a good thing, even if they could. A better route, I think, is security provided by internet providers and web companies. People will tend to use the most secure services, which will drive market innovation in security.
I don't think I personally believe anyone can assume that anything they write will not be read by anyone else. In grade school kids pass notes and Sally, Jill's friend is bound to read the not I gave Jill. The only difference with the pager is the medium and the consequences.
ReplyDeleteNow the legal ramifications are another issue, obviously the pagers were not the property of those individuals but of the city and therefore of the citizens of the city as their tax-payer dollars went into paying for them. In light of that, they users of the equipment are held at a higher standard or at least should be.
I think it is really interesting how a court would rule in a case of a business providing cell phones to their employees and then coming across the same type of problems. Many business provided their these perks and must usually provide in writing certain regulations to ensure such practices don't happen.
In today's world the word PRIVACY seems to have lost its meaning. As much as technology enhances our daily lives, and enables easier communication, it also deceives the users. We use technology and feel in control, but until something like those emails on SNOPE happens we realize that the technology can also be in control of us.
ReplyDeleteI personally think it was a violation of rights to go through the officers; text messages, because they are personal, and the users pay additional price. These messages might be inappropriate but as long as they do not implicate their job in any way, why is it such a huge deal?
I feel uneasy to rely on internet and other electronic communication. Besides the fact that it helps deteriorate "in person" communication, it can be abused.