Brief this case and answer the case questions. Case. Jeff Quon, a sergeant and member of the city of Ontar io's SWAT team, sent personal and sometimes racy text messages to Sergeant Steve Trujillo, dispatcher April Florio, and his wife Jerilyn Quon (respondents) using Arch Wireless text-messaging services that were pro- vided for Quon through the city. for auditing. Under the city's contract with Arch Wireless, each Ontario Police Department (the city) (OPD) (peti- pager was allotted 25,000 characters, after which the tioners) had no official policy directly addressing the use of text messaging. However, the city did have a city was required to pay overage charges. Quon's supervisor told him that he was over by more than general "Computer Usage, Internet, and E-mail Policy" applicable to all employees. The policy provided that all software, programs, networks, Internet, e-mail, and other systems were to be used only for city of Ontario related business. The policy also said, "Users should 15,000 characters and that he should reimburse the city for the overage charges so that he (the supervi sor) would not have to audit the transmission and see how many messages werenon-work related. Quon refused to pay and was told to cut down on his have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when transmissions. When Quon and another officer again exceeded the 25,000-character limit, his supervisor told the officers that he was "tired of being a bill collector with guys going over the allotted amount of characters on their text pagers." Ontario's chief of police, Chief Scharf, then requested an audit of the text messages. Because city officials were not able to access the text messages themselves, they requested and obtained the messages from Arch Wireless. The audit of the messages revealed abuse of on-the-clock time through sheer num bers of personal texts and their sexually explicit content. The officers were disciplined, and they subsequently challenged the discipline by claiming violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. The trial court found that there was a Fourth Amendment violation but granted Arch Wireless a summary judgment on Quon's claims of invasion of privacy. The Ninth Circuit held that the search was unreasonable and the city appealed. JUdICIaL OpINION KENNEDY, Justice The City's Computer Policy stated that "[u]sers should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when using" City computers. Chief Scharf's memo and Duke's statements made clear that this official policy extended to text messaging. The disagreement is over whether Duke's later statements over-rode the official policy. Respondents contend that because Duke told Quon that an audit would be unnecessary if Quon paid for the overage, Quon reasonably could expect that the contents of his messages would remain private. Cell phone and text message communications are so pervasive that some persons may consider them to be essential means or necessary instruments for self-expression, even self-identification. That might strengthen the case for an expectation of privacy. On the other hand, the ubiquity of those devices has made them generally affordable, so one could counter that employees who need cell phones or similar devices for personal matters can purchase and pay for their own. Even if Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his text messages, petitioners did not nec essarily violate the Fourth Amendment by obtaining and reviewing the transcripts. Although as a general matter, warrantless searches "are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment," there are "a few spe cifically established and well-delineated exceptions" to that general rule. The Court has held that the "'special needs'" of the workplace justify one such exception. The search here was reasonable under that approach. The search was justified at its inception because there were "reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search [was] necessary for a noninvestigatory work-related purpose." Chief Scharf ordered the search in order to determine whether the character limit on the City's contract with Arch Wireless was sufficient to meet the City's needs. This was, as the Ninth Circuit noted, a "legitimate work-related rationale." The City and OPD had a legitimate interest in ensuring that employees were not being forced to pay out of their own pockets for work-related expenses, or on the other hand that the City was not paying for extensive personal communications. As for the scope of the search, OPD requested tran scripts for only the months of August and September 2002. While it may have been reasonable as well for OPD to review transcripts of all the months in which Quon exceeded his allowance, it was certainly reason able for OPD to review messages for just two months in order to obtain a large enough sample to decide whether the character limits were efficacious. And it is worth noting that during his internal affairs investiga tion, McMahon redacted all messages Quon sent while off duty, a measure which reduced the intrusiveness of any further review of the transcripts. Even if he could assume some level of privacy would inhere in his messages, it would not have been reasonable for Quon to conclude that his messages were in all circumstances immune from scrutiny. Quon was told that his messages were subject to auditing. As a law enforcement officer, he would or should have known that his actions were likely to come under legal scrutiny, and that this might entail an analysis of his on-the-job communications. Under the circumstances, a reasonable employee would be aware that sound management principles might require the audit of messages to determine whether the pager was being appropriately used. Given that the City issued the pagers to Quon and other SWAT Team members in order to help them more quickly respond to crises and given that Quon had received no assurances of privacyQuon could have anticipated that it might be necessary for the City to audit pager messages to assess the SWAT Team's performance in particular emergency situations. OPD's audit of messages on Quon's employer-pro vided pager was not nearly as intrusive as a search of his personal e-mail account or pager, or a wiretap on his home phone line, would have been. That the search did reveal intimate details of Quon's life does not make it unreasonable, for under the circumstances a reason able employer would not expect that such a review would intrude on such matters. This Court has "repeatedly refused to declare that only the 'least intrusive' search practicable can be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment." That rationale "could raise insuperable barriers to the exercise of virtually all search-and-seizure powers," because "judges engaged in post hoc evaluations of govern ment conduct can almost always imagine some alternative means by which the objectives of the government might have been accomplished." Even assuming there were ways that OPD could have performed the search that would have been less intrusive, it does not follow that the search as conducted was unreasonable. Finally, the Court must consider whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Jerilyn Quon, Florio, and Trujillo, the respondents who sent text messages to Jeff Quon. Petitioners and respondents disagree whether a sender of a text message can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a message he knowingly sends to someone's employer-provided pager. It is not necessary to resolve this question in order to dispose of the case, however. Respondents argue that because "the search was unreasonable as to Sergeant Quon, it was also unreasonable as to his corre spondents." They make no corollary argument that the search, if reasonable as to Quon, could nonetheless be unreasonable as to Quon's correspondents. In light of this litigating position and the Court's conclusion that the search was reasonable as to Jeff Quon, it necessarily follows that these other respondents cannot prevail. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed. Case questions. 1. What general advice could you give a business about its access to employees' text messages based on the decision in this case? 2. Why are alternative methods for searching the text messages not relevant? 3. How does the court deal with the issue of expectation of privacy on the part of the officer's family and friends?

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1 Based on the decision in this case a business should ensure that it has clear and explicit policie... View the full answer