Actually this thread was not about routine employer-employee searches, but Harvard College and faculty email searches. Harvard is as far as I can tell unique in

Actually this thread was not about routine employer-employee searches, but Harvard College and faculty email searches. Harvard is as far as I can tell unique in providing its faculty -- thanks to a very able computer science professor there -- with contractual privacy rights that go above and beyond the rights any other university or employer provides. (The resident deans whose email was searched were faculty, not staff employees. The 12 RDs of the Houses are faculty with a lecturer rank: two of them serve on the Faculty Council; Harvard views RDs as faculty when reporting faculty counts; Harvard tells US News and World Report they're full-time faculty, etc.) But then of course the thread veered into other directions including Google, Qwest, shell corporations, the NSA, the British Parliament, Comcast, etc. As usual!