FANNIE GARCIA, Plaintiff-Appellant v. CITY OF LAREDO, TEXAS, A Home Rule City; CARLOS MALDONADO, Chief of the City of Laredo, TX Police Department, Individually and in His Official Capacity; CYNTHIA COLLAZO, Deputy City Manager of the City of Laredo, TX, Individually and in Her Official Capacity; GILBERT NAVARRO, Former Interim/Acting Chief of the Police Department of the City of Laredo, TX, Individually and in His Official Capacity; GILBERT MAGANA, Investigator, Internal Affairs Division of the Police Department of the City of Laredo, TX, Individually and in His Official Capacity; STEVEN MONCEVAIS, Crime Scene Unit Investigator of the Police Department of the City of Laredo, TX, Individually and in His Official Capacity; RAQUEL BUENROSTRO, Conspirator, Defendants-Appellees, 702 F.3d 788

Summary

The dispatcher claimed that defendants violated the SCA by accessing the contents of her cell phone without permission. She alleged that a police officer's wife accessed text messages and images on the dispatcher's phone and showed them to city officials. A subsequent investigation concluded that the dispatcher had violated police department rules, and she was terminated. The court of appeals held that the dispatcher's cell phone was not a "facility" protected by the SCA, which applied to facilities operated by electronic communication service providers. Even if the cell phone were a facility, storage of text messages and images on the cell phone did not fit within the definition under 18 U.S.C.S. § 2510(17) of "electronic storage," which encompassed only information stored by an electronic communication service provider. The dispatcher's personal cell phone did not provide an electronic communication service just because the device enabled use of electronic communication services. The...