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Wednesday September 19 6:29 PM ET

Judges Set Precedent for Workplace Privacy

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal courts agreed Wednesday to adopt relaxed guidelines for monitoring the Internet use of judges and other employees, a move that could lead to greater privacy protection for employees nationwide.

The Judicial Conference of U.S. Courts, a 27-judge panel led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, decided to strike language from its new Internet-use policy that said the nation's 30,000 court employees have no right to privacy when they send e-mail or surf the Web after several judges objected earlier this summer.

While the policy does not guarantee any specific right to privacy while at work, the omission was seen by privacy experts as a victory for judges who sought to keep their e-mail communications private.

The issue could also have a lasting effect on workplace- privacy laws, as judges may be more likely to identify with workers suing their employees for privacy violations, said Stewart Baker, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C.

``It will probably make many members of the judiciary more sympathetic to employees,'' Baker said. ``That would be what they used to call in the '60s a 'radicalizing event.'''

The judges adopted a computer-use policy similar to those in place at many private businesses. Court computers should largely be used for work, the policy says, and should not be used to view pornography, gambling, illegal weapons or to clog the network with large digital-music or other media files.

The privacy issue came to the fore when judges in the 9th Circuit District Court in San Francisco disabled monitoring software for a week in May in protest.

Judges from other circuits have also objected to having their private communications available to outsiders.

While the decision only applies to the internal offices of the courts themselves, a judge involved in the decision acknowledged that the policy may be seen as a precedent.

``I think anything the court system does overall may have an impact on the operation of private businesses,'' said Chief U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II, who sits in the Southern District of West Virginia in Charleston.

``Certainly it was a factor in the decision making process,'' he said. ``We as judges are particularly concerned about privacy and any content monitoring.''

LAWS PERMIT MONITORING

Federal laws against wiretapping prevent monitoring of employee conversations under most circumstances, but a 1986 law explicitly permits businesses to monitor how employees use other communications equipment.

Software that monitors Web and e-mail use, voice-mail retrieval software and keystroke and screen-capture software are all in widespread use in the corporate world.

Three-quarters of U.S. businesses electronically monitor employees in some fashion, according to the American Management Association. A separate report by the Denver-based Privacy Foundation estimates that one in three employees who use the Internet at work have their online browsing monitored.

Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia and Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York introduced a bill to limit workplace surveillance last year, but it failed to pass.