Comment Not sure that is a correct reading of the opinion (Score 1) 263
That said, I read the entire opinion, and there is a nuance in what was decided that seems to have been overlooked here, at least thus far.
In the case in question, the police officer named in the suit was using his work-issue pager to send personal messages, but the initial inquiry was a result of the good-faith request of the police chief to check into whether the issue was that the number of characters per month (set at 25,000) that had been contracted with Arch Wireless was sufficient to the task. Only upon examination of the details of those transmissions did the personal nature of them come into focus.
If I read the opinion correctly, the fact that the messages were examined for a non-disciplinary reason (in this case, to ascertain if the upper limit on characters sent per month was sufficient to encompass all of the required official communications.