The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a ruling regarding the privacy of personal SMS messages sent and received by an Ontario, Calif., policeman on his official pager.

“Last June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Ontario police Sgt. Jeff Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in personal text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager in the absence of an official policy regarding pager use,” writes Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan.

“The case goes back to August 2002, a couple of years after Quon and other members of the Ontario police department were issued pagers,” Vijayan writes. “At that time, the city had no official policy related to text messaging. However, it did have a general computer, Internet and e-mail usage policy that made it explicitly clear that the systems were to be used only for official purposes.”

Click here to read the Computerworld story.