Bi-Weekly Political Happy Hour in Bridgeport

This is a new bi-weekly happy hour discussion on Thursday evenings, 6-8pm, for our members in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. The location is the brand new Conshohocken Brewpub in Bridgeport, just a mile east of the KOP Mall on Route 202 and right across the Schuylkill from downtown Norristown. We're hoping this location is convenient for you folks who live or work in the King Of Prussia, Norristown, Plymouth Meeting, Conshohocken & Main Line areas and enables more of you to come out & join us.

The area of focus will be somewhat different than our biweekly Saturday meetups in Fishtown. We'll be specifically focusing on international relations, military science, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and civil law. My co-host for this meetup, Wayne, is a practicing attorney in the Philly area who studied international relations in undergrad and served on a nuclear sub in the Navy, so he's very knowledgeable in these areas & a great asset to these types of discussions.

This week, we'll be discussing the way the legal guarantee of a "right to privacy" has been thrown into flux by new advances in surveillance technology. A classis example of this is Baltimore, where police have used Stingrays to pinpoint people through their cell phones and aerial surveillance to obtain visual evidence, but they have often obfuscated how they obtained this evidence when it came to trial: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/investigations/bs-md-sun-investigates-surveillance-cases-20160829-story.html

A lot of the relevant legal background for both aerial surveillance & CCTV cameras in public areas depends on the "plain view doctrine" which allows a warrantless search based on anything witnessed in public that's incriminating enough to generate probable cause, and the "open-fields doctrine" which allows a warrantless search outside a property owner's "curtilage" (i.e. the land immediately surrounding a dwelling). In the past, surveillance was limited by the need to have a police officer physically present, but new surveillance technologies have completely changed that.

We'll discuss two articles that argue for & against the growing surveillance state:

1. Eugene Volokh, "The Benefits of Surveillance" - http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/camerascomm.htm

2. Eric Boehm, "Baltimore Police Deploy Surveillance Tech Designed for The Iraq War" - http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/25/baltimore-police-deploy-surveillance-tec