During my working days, I’ve disciplined and even discharged employees over stuff like this. Many employees have some very foolish ideas about their 1st Am. “rights” as they relate to their job; basically, they don’t have any.

First, the 9th Circuit says that an employee’s speech made in the course of their job is not 1st Am. protected individual speech but rather the employee is an agent of the government and consequently, the employee’s speech is the government’s speech. Therefore, if an employee speaks under color of their office, there is no individual 1st Am. protection available. (Can’t remember the cite but it was a ciy attorney v. Gil Garcetti, former LA DA.) The employee does not have to go so far as indicating that he is speaking in his capacity as the Widget Making Manager for the Government. If he is divulging knowledge that he could only have as the result of being a government employee, he is engaging in government speech, not individual speech. There are some very explicit protections under “whistleblower” laws, but if an employee is planning to use those protections, there’s better not be any underlying misconduct and he’d best have tried to bring the matter to the attention of his superiors.

Second, most state and local ethics acts also specifically prohibit divulging or making use of for personal benefit any information obtained in the course of one’s duties that has not already been divulged to the public. Seeking a political advantage has been considered to be a benefit within this provision by many administrative agencies and courts. Here, likewise, there are specific whistleblower protections but they are limited and very explicit in most whistleblower laws.

Bottom line: even in a government job, if you don’t like what your boss is doing, unless what he’s doing and your reactions comport with a whistleblower law, you’d best either keep your mouth shut or find other employment.

Actually, what I find remarkable about this story is that it is usually perfectly safe to leak, thwart, and sabotage Republican officeholders, so there’s some back story here.

if you hold a government job high enough up the ladder that you actually know anything worth knowing, you’d best be very careful who you talk to and what you talk about. I, of course, don’t know the facts regarding what was and was not public, but if the info isn’t publicly available, being on your own time and own computer is not a defense. This is the game Sarah Palin has tried to play and if the complainants can keep in the game against the money and delaying tactics of the State, Palin will eventually lose in the Courts as well.

If I wanted somebody for something like this, I’d just haul them in administratively and order them to tell me who they’d contacted, scrupulously adhering to their due process rights and any union rights they might have of course. I’d be hoping they’d turn guardhouse lawyer on me and try to refuse to tell me on 1st or 5th Am. grounds. When they refused, I’d just fire them for refusing a lawful order then sit back to see how much money and how many friends they had.

As I said, it’s usually pretty safe to be a Democrat or Democrat sympathizer leaking and sabotaging a Republican administration because the Republicans usualy won’t do anything about it. Democrats will hunt you down and shoot you like a dog in the road. If I needed to be, I was a very well-connected and skillful leaker and I got out some very embarrasing information about a Democrat Administration I worked for. They knew I did it but they couldn’t prove it and they hounded me endlessly about it and almost got me.