The CodeGuard Blog

In a 9 – 0 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that employees do not have a right to privacy when using company phones to text each other.  The court’s ruling sent a clear message to privacy advocates worldwide, by saying that a supervisor’s search through employee text messages was in fact a search, but was not an “unreasonable” search, in their opinion last Friday.  I read about it in the Los Angeles Times here. 

A couple of things are interesting in this case.  First, the court apparently considered text messaging to be similar to any other public paging system.  So, in effect, it looks like sending a text message could be legally as open as calling someone through the Airport public address system.  I’m sure we will hear more about this in the future.

Second, the court rejected a broad interpretation of in individual’s right to privacy by the US 9th Circuit Court.  Normally, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 9^th  Circuit Court supported and privacy rights for pigeons on the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  However, many people, including me, wondered if the Supreme Court would broaden privacy protection, somehow.  In this ruling, it didn’t happen.

Under this ruling, it looks like your employer can have a closer look at text messages.  It might also extend to email messages in some future decision.  Certainly, a broader interpretation of privacy would have opened up the possibility of lawsuits for those of us who monitoring corporate networks.  The threat of lawsuits would have prevented many legal searches, simply because it would be too much trouble to defend.

Some people will say that the US is losing a right to individual privacy.  I’d have to disagree.  This ruling is putting privacy into perspective.  It’s also going to help protect information security professionals from baseless lawsuits as they perform legitimate monitoring for employers. 

Jim Molini, CISSP, CSSLP