page_title: City of Ontario v. Quon
section_title: Litigation
hierarchical_section_title: City of Ontario v. Quon / Litigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Logo of Arch Wireless; now known as USA Mobility Wireless
context_page_description: Ontario v. Quon, 560 U.S. 746, is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the extent to which the right to privacy applies to electronic communications in a government workplace. It was an appeal by the city of Ontario, California, from a Ninth Circuit decision holding that it had violated the Fourth Amendment rights of two of its police officers when it disciplined them following an audit of pager text messages that discovered many of those messages were personal in nature, some sexually explicit. The Court unanimously held that the audit was work-related and thus did not violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
  Ontario police sergeant Jeff Quon, along with other officers and those they were exchanging messages with, had sued the city, their superiors and the pager service provider in federal court. They had alleged a violation of not only their constitutional rights but federal telecommunications privacy laws. Their defense was that a superior officer had promised the pager messages themselves would not be audited if the officers reimbursed the city for fees it incurred when they exceeded a monthly character limit.
context_section_description: The case began in federal court. After a district court found in favor of the defendants, a three-judge appellate panel reversed the decision. The circuit court denied a petition for an en banc rehearing; a simultaneous certiorari petition to the Supreme Court was granted.
  A major issue at all levels was whether the department's written Internet policy, or Duke's practice of just collecting the overage fee, was the operating reality of the OPD workplace. If it was the former, Quon had no reasonable expectation of privacy for his pager messages. The city and department argued that Duke could not set or amend policy so what he said was irrelevant. And even if it was, it did not matter since the pager messages could be disclosed under the California Public Records Act. The plaintiffs argued that since Duke was the officer in charge of the contract with Arch, and the policy change that covered the pagers was never communicated in any definitive way, his assurance that he would not read Quon's messages if he reimbursed the city was all that mattered.
  For Quon's co-plaintiffs, there was what one commentator later called "the really tricky question in the case", their claim that the city violated their privacy in the course of investigating Quon. Two of the other plaintiffs were OPD employees who had not had pager overuse problems, and the third, his estranged wife, had left the OPD's employment and was using her own pager. The city argued that they should have been aware Quon had no expectation of privacy and that thus their exchanges with him would not be protected, either.
caption: Arch Wireless logo
exif: {}