The FBI later seized and searched the employee' s computer system and emails. A court ruled that the employee had no expectation of privacy because the government had a long-standing government policy permitting audits of computer hard drives. In one case, a California newspaper was able to obtain all email relating to city business in Menlo Park written over a six week period under California's Public Record Act. In another matter, an Arizona newspaper was able to obtain backup tapes of a computer server containing email from a local county assessor's office. There's more to employer monitoring of email than voyeurism.
Employers have several legitimate concerns about employee email.
Old fashioned as it may seem, employers prefer to pay employees for doing work, not sending personal messages. Employers are also worried that email will be used within the workplace to harass or offend other employees. But the biggest concern that many businesses have is that archived email will come back to haunt them in court. Unlike a conversation around the water cooler, the email statements of employees can live indefinitely on in backup tapes of corporate systems. For example, when government lawyers sued Microsoft over antitrust issues, some of the most incendiary evidence came from archived emails that documented statements by Microsoft executives about its strategy against competitors such as Netscape.