MPR: How Private is the Home Computer?

How Private is the Home Computer?
by Bill Catlin
February 8, 2000

Northwest Airlines and its flight attendants union today resumed negotiations aimed at ending a more than three-and-a-half-year old contract dispute. Meanwhile, the company suspended the bulk of its ongoing effort to search the home computers of flight attendants. A federal judge in St. Paul authorized the searches in connection with a company lawsuit accusing flight attendants of conducting an illegal sick-out. The judge has put that lawsuit on hold. But critics say the airline's effort intrudes on First Amendment rights and invades employee privacy.

The Surveillance Society
What are the limits of privacy in the technology age? Find out more on MPR's Surveillance Society site.

NORTHWEST ACCUSES members of Teamsters Local 2000 of organizing an illegal sick-out that forced the cancellation of numerous flights over New Year's. The company has won the right to look for evidence on the home computers of more than two-dozen flight attendants. While the court order yesterday brings that effort to a temporary halt in most cases, it does not apply to two flight attendants who ran online message boards where some anonymous postings called for a sick-out. Their attorney, Barbara Harvey, says company investigators collected computer data this afternoon.

Harvey: It's a very intimidating situation for an employee to suddenly and unexpectedly be faced with a demand from his employer for production to the employer of every statement that employee has made in private on his own time to other people about the employer.

Harvey says the result is thousands of flight attendants have been intimidated, and are refraining from electronic communications about the contract situation. She says the case has caused enormous damage to their free-speech rights.

Northwest officials officials declined to comment. But they have previously defended the searches saying the process of producing evidence increasingly involves searching computers, because so many communications are purely electronic.

Rick Ross a Minneapolis employment attorney says situations that occur outside the workplace routinely affect the relationship between companies and their workers. Ross says Northwest has received the right to look for evidence of union efforts to organize a sick-out.

"It is setting more intrusive rules for digital evidence than we have for paper evidence."

- Jim Dempsey
Center for Democracy and Technology

Ross:And if they're using their home computers and e-mails that are not through work to communicate, that's the only vehicle available for Northwest to prove that theory.

But critics point out the searches are a departure from normal evidence-gathering procedures. The flight attendants have to surrender the information on their hard drive to company investigators. Usually, parties that have to produce evidence are permitted to do their own review and then turn over relevant material. In this case, Northwest's investigators from the firm of Ernst & Young do their own review of the hard drives first. But Teamsters attorney Mike Bloom defends the arrangement, saying the union ensured that investigators can not just peer through anything they find.

Bloom: I can't reiterate enough, these documents are not being turned over to the company. Earnst and Young, by court order, must give those documents to the union's attorneys first. We will review those documents, and decide which ones we want to produce.

Dempsey: Still, there's the fact that one party is rummaging through the other party's life.

Jim Dempsey with the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology criticizes the arrangement. He says parties in lawsuits have a right to computer evidence, but he says the rulings in this case overstep by allowing access to the entire hard drive.

Dempsey: And it is setting more intrusive rules for digital evidence than we have for paper evidence.

Judge Donovan Frank declined to comment on the case.

Union attorney Mike Bloom contends the company's effort to search home computers may make it harder to resolve the contract dispute.

Bloom: Northwest Airlines needs to remember that the people whose hard drives that they wish to search are the very same people that need to ratify a contract. The word quickly spreads and, as a result, the entire membership becomes very disturbed with the conduct of the company, and that just makes it even more difficult to settle a labor dispute.

Amid the fray over privacy and free-speech issues, negotiators for Northwest and the union began talks scheduled to last three weeks. And while the lawsuit contributed to the resumption of talks, it may also impede the effort to end the labor dispute that precipitated it.

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