Pilot Sues Airline Over Internet Privacy

ByABC News
January 9, 2001, 9:11 AM

H O N O L U L U, Jan. 9 -- A federal appeals court panel has ordered a trial for a Hawaiian Airlines pilot who says company officials illegally entered a secure Internet site where he criticized the airline and his union.

Robert Konop accused airline officials of violating the Wiretap Act and other federal laws in 1995 by reading the Web site that was intended only for certain pilots who were required to log in with a user name and password.

The Web site criticized proposed wage concessions that were supported by the Air Line Pilots Association, and urged pilots to consider getting new union representatives.

Judge J. Spencer Letts of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled from the bench in the late 1990s in favor of the airline.

Monday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled the lower court should have allowed a trial on Konops claims that airline officials broke privacy and collective bargaining laws by reading the site and by alerting union officials to it.

An employment law expert said the case puts a high-tech twist on an old workplace concern.

Employers have always had concerns about employees who criticize them, whether its complaints to a fellow worker on the next bench at the factory or its two guys in a bar, said Stephen Sugarman, a University of California at Berkeley law professor.

The question in Konops case is whether the same rules that prohibit the recording of off-the-clock communications between employees also apply to postings on Web sites not intended for the general public.

Was the Wiretap Act Broken?

Konop, a DC-10 captain who lives in Playa del Rey, Calif., claimed that in December 1995 a now-retired Hawaiian Airlines vice president, James Davis, asked a pilot who was eligible to view the site for permission to use the pilots name to gain access to it.

Davis claimed he was concerned about false allegations that he believed Konop was making on the site, the appeals court said.