True, that does complicate it a bit. I'm not an expert in this area by any stretch, but from what I've read, employees' rights are still pretty strongly curtailed. The courts have generally held that the government acting in its role as employer, rather than its police-power role, has roughly the same authority as a private employer would have with respect to its employees. The test for which role it's acting in at a given time is basically whether the search could reasonably be considered work-related. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_v._Quon was a recent case.