The Supreme Court leaps today into the high-tech world of text messaging in a challenge with potentially huge implications for the privacy rights of senders and receivers and for workplace communications.

City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, one of two cases leading off the final round of oral arguments this term, is the Court’s first foray into workplace monitoring of electronic and digital communications.

The city asks the justices whether a member of its police SWAT team had a Fourth Amendment “reasonable expectation of privacy” in text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager. The case also raises the issue of whether the senders of messages to the SWAT pager had their own reasonable expectation that the city would not review their messages.

“It’s a new area. It’s complicated, and the stakes are high given the shift in how people communicate,” said Andrew Pincus, partner in the Washington office of Mayer Brown, who filed an amicus brief supporting the police officer, Jeff Quon, on behalf of civil liberties and consumer groups.
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