NEARLY everyone lives by their smartphone these days, including U.S. Supreme Court justices. In Riley v. California, the nations highest court recently acknowledged this, finding all citizens have a Fourth Amendment right of privacy in their cellphones. The often-divided court was unanimous.
Before the Riley decision, lower courts were split on whether it was necessary to obtain a warrant before searching a suspects cellphone. Justice John Roberts definitively settled the dispute: Get a warrant.
The federal and Washington state constitutions are often tested in the context of criminal activity, but the ramifications of this ruling are weighty and will send ripples well beyond criminal suspects. The Riley decision speaks to the privacy rights of all in the digital age, including public employees.
Washington states Constitution provides citizens broader privacy rights than the Fourth Amendment, and the state Supreme Court has been ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court on this issue.
The Riley ruling will help decrease harassment of public employees by prison inmates and others who attempt to use Washington states Public Records Act to violate the privacy rights of teachers, firefighters, police officers, prosecutors and other public servants.
Pierce County and other government entities have been sued by requesters who wrongly claim the Public Records Act is a license to search the personal phones of public servants to determine if there have been work-related conversations or if personal phones were used during work hours. This far-fetched and shortsighted theory violates the privacy of public servants, their families, friends, and everyone who contacts them.
Such lawsuits against Pierce County have been twice dismissed by Superior Court judges, though the issues are continuing to wind through the courts. The Superior Court agreed that personal phone records and text messages are not public records and are protected by both the Washington and U.S. constitutions.
Public servants and other law-abiding citizens do not have fewer rights than criminals.
Some argue public servants could hide behind the state or federal constitution and somehow create shadow governments, and therefore they should give up their constitutional rights. Imagine, teachers could be forced to turn over their personal phones to be searched for public records because they might have talked or texted with a students parent. This is a good premise for a dystopian movie, but a bad law for a free society, and fortunately this is not the law in the United States or in Washington state.
Our federal Supreme Court has specifically held that public employees do not give up their constitutional rights by working for the public. Public employees make sacrifices to serve our communities, but they do not sacrifice their constitutional rights. Like private-sector employees, public-sector employees have a free-speech right to talk about their work and a constitutional right to privacy as well. Private landlines, which do not create public records, did not result in shadow governments and neither will personal cellphones.
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Guest: Why the privacy of a public employees cellphone matters