The Panopticon Perplex – Big Other, 5G and the Telecom ‘Coup from Above’

Waking up Watched and Behaviorally Modified in Surveillance Society

By James Heddle – EON
[ Earlier versions of this article were posted on Reader Supported News and Columbus Free Press ]

Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Every single day
Every word you say
I’ll be watching
  The Police

Digital Domination

Back in the 1780’s British social theorist Jeremy Bentham and his entrepreneur brother came up with a design for what they thought would be the perfect prison. 

It consisted of a multi-storied outer ring of brightly lit prison cells, each with a floor-to-ceiling window facing a central tower covered with opaque glass. 

The Bentham bros figured that if the inmates believed they were being surveilled twenty-four-seven, they would behave themselves – whether or not there were actually any guards in the tower.  Effortless social control.  Jeremy called it a panopticon.

Benthams’ design was never implemented architecturally in Britain, but a corrupt dictatorship in Cuba in the 1920’s built the Presidio Modelo, a close approximation now long abandoned.

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, French philosopher Michel Foucault used the concept as a metaphor for what he called ‘disciplinary societies’ in which the citizen is the target of ‘asymmetrical surveillance’ – “He is seen, but does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject of communication,” Foucault wrote.

Now two recent books are alerting us to the fact that we are on the brink of becoming inmates actually living in what amounts to a digitally enabled planetary panopticon.

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, by investigative journalist Yasha Levine, shows the seamless connections between the military and corporate development of the internet – including so-called encryption applications.

Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Harvard Business School emerita professor Shoshana Zuboff, shows in depth how the internet and its data mining and monetization offshoots have morphed into an unprecedented system of societal behavioral modification for corporate profit. 

Taken together these books are a wake-up call that we must quickly develop new concepts, understandings and modes of analysis and resistance if we are to avoid being digitally enslaved, yet so unaware of our enslavement that we are, as Professor Zuboff puts it, “singing in our chains.”

Two Stems from the Same Root – the Military and Commercial Internet

Levine’s book takes us through his process of discovery that the origins of what we now know as the ‘world wide web’ lie in the U.S. military’s quest for effective counterinsurgency methods in the Viet Nam war.   The Internet, he shows, was born from the desire for domination and population control and has never really lost that essential character.

He debunks the popular twin internet creation myths that its origins lie (1) in the military’s quest for a non-decapitatable command structure to survive a nuclear war and (2) the liberatory fantasies of the likes of Stewart Brand and “radical young computer engineers and playful hackers” of the San Francisco Bay Area’s “acid-drenched counterculture.”

The latter was a idealistic, seductive and naive vision, embraced by many at the time (including my young self) and expressed by the subsiquently suicidal poet Richard Brautigan:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

The reality was far darker than we knew.

“Since the start of the personal computer and Internet revolution,” Levine writes, “we’ve been told again and again that we are in the grips of a liberating technology, a tool that decentralizes power, topples entrenched bureaucracies, and brings more democracy and equality to the world. Personal computers and information networks were supposed to be the new frontier of freedom – a techno-utopia where authoritarian and repressive structures lost their power, and where the creation of a better world was still possible. And all that we, global citizens, had to do for this new and better world to flower and bloom was to get out of the way and let Internet companies innovate and the market work its magic. This narrative has been planted deep into our culture’s collective subconscious and holds a powerful sway over the way we view the Internet today.”

“But,” on the basis of his extensive research he says, “spend time looking at the nitty-gritty business details of the Internet and the story gets darker, less optimistic.  If the Internet is truly such a revolutionary break from the past, why are companies like Google in bed with the cops and spies?”

From ARPA to DARPA to Tor’s ‘Back Doors’

A key revelation of Levine’s book is that the US military not only fathered the Internet, but that it also sired the encryption system, beloved of privacy advocates, known as Tor.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in the Viet Nam era and quickly applied technology to American wartime aims.  By the late 60’s it launched ARPANET.  By the 1990’s ARPA and morphed into DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and ARPANET had evolved into the Internet. 

“Everything was being hooked up to the Internet,” writes Levine, “banks, phones, power plants, universities, military bases, corporations, and foreign governments, both hostile and friendly.” But an open Internet, with every communication traceable to its source is not a safe place for spies operating under deep cover to communicate.  So a DARPA team of mathematicians and geeks came up with a solution they called ‘the onion router’ or Tor.

The Navy set up a parallel system of servers that sat on top of the Internet.  Covert traffic got redirected into this parallel network and bounced around from one Tor shell node to another so that when it finally surfaced in the Internet nobody could tell where it had come from.

But developers realized that if the system was used only by military and intelligence agencies, people would soon come to suspect any anonymized messages were “coming from the CIA.” 

“To truly hide spies and soldiers,” Levine explains, “Tor needed to distance itself from its Pentagon roots and include as many different users as possible. Activists, students, corporate researchers, soccer moms, journalists, drug dealers, hackers, child pornographers, agents of foreign intelligence services, terrorists.  Tor was like a public square – the bigger and more diverse the group assembled there, the better the spies could hide in the crowd.”

So in 2004, Roger Dingledine, one of the system’s key developers spun the onion routing project – still funded by DARPA – into a nonprofit corporation called the Tor Project.

Soon the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a Silicon Valley privacy advocacy group claiming to be against government surveillance programs gave the Tor Project nearly a quarter of a million dollars in bridging funding until it found other sponsors.  The EFF even hosted the Tor website so that users would be reassured by a message from EFF: “Your traffic is safer when you use Tor.”

The EFF has a strange history for a privacy advocacy outfit.  “In 1994,” Levine reports, “EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI.”

But EFF cover made Tor into an effective Trojan Horse operation trusted even by the likes of such arch surveillance resistors as Glen Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden. 

What better way for the surveillance state to spy on its citizens than to supply them with a system they believe to by surveillance-proof and clears the way for surveillance capitalism?

Understanding the Unprecedented

Professor Zuboff ‘s Surveillance Capitalism offers several sobering definitions of surveillance capitalism.  One of them is, “An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” 

In a highly readable, felicitously phrased, brilliantly argued and engaging 525 pages (not counting notes and sources), she traces the evolution of what can only be described as a diabolical system of incipient corporate domination.

Because this system is unprecedented in human history, we have no analytical concepts or descriptive terms for its components.  What we cannot name, we cannot understand or resist.  Faced with the unprecedented, Zuboff explains, we tend to respond in ways that may have worked in the past, but are inadequate and inappropriate to the new situation. 

‘Surveillance capitalism,’ is a term first coined by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney.   “Surveillance capitalism,” she explains, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.  Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.  Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of market place for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.  Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.“

The competitive pressures of this new market have driven prediction product developers to discover that “the most predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.”  The aim of the game is now to “not only know our behavior, but to shape our behavior at scale.”  This is a new phase of capitalism in which the ‘means of production’ become subordinate to new ‘means of behavioral modification.’

This has given birth to a new species of power that Zuboff calls instrumentalism.  Instead of automating production, it aims to automate us.

“Instrumentarian power,” she says, “knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends.  Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of ‘smart’ networked devices, things and spaces.”

The vision is to create a synthetic, electronically mediated environment  which is a kind of grotesquely distorted mirror image of the natural ecology in which ‘everything is connected to everything else.’  It envisions an Internet of Things (IOT) in which your refrigerator, your car, your sex toys, your ‘wearable’ heart monitor and your GPS-enabled running shoes and more will all be united into a meta-entity, linked to everyone else’s in what Zuboff terms the Big Other.

Compliance or Defiance…That is the question.

As Zuboff’s work shows, this instrumentarian system of power already surrounds us to an alarming degree, like the proverbial frog in the soon to be boiling water. 

When Google, quickly followed by others, first ventured into these unmapped cyber domains, they were like an invasive species with no predators, pioneers in an unregulated Wild West.  Now that we know what they’re up to, is it too late to hop out of the pot and turn off the heat? 

Zuboff doesn’t think so.  She refuses to buy the corporate myth of technological inevitability. She invites us to ‘be the friction’ which will slow and eventually block this slide into digital domination.

“I say it is not OK to have our best instincts for connection, empathy, and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip search of our lives.  It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance and desire to be catalogued, manipulated and then used to herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit.”

It is a question, she says, “of who decides who decides.”  Democracy itself is what’s at stake.

“If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades,” she concludes, “it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us….Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first.”

Interviewed on Democracy Now, Zuboff laid out how she thinks we can get there. “We have work to do. But this is work that can be done. Our elected officials can be educated. If they don’t want to get educated, we can elect different people. This is stuff that we can fix. I do believe that.”

She went on to explain, “You know, even into the 20th century, we still had courts, judges who were making decisions that completely sided with the industrialists, whom we have now renamed as “robber barons.” In time, all of these actions are reinterpreted as history shakes out, and democracy finally finds its way through to the light. And that’s what I believe—that’s the process that we’re in now. This thing is 20 years old. We’re at the beginning, not the end. We name it, we tame it. That’s the work now, to reignite our democracy, wake it up for this work of the 21st century.”

The Internet; ’The Blob that Engulfs the World’  vs. “We Name It, We Tame It.”

Yes, there is push-back, and more informed resistance is vitally needed before its too late.  Google employees forced the cancellation of a Pentagon contract to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for lethal purposes.  Public opposition just blocked a planned Amazon headquarters in New York. The UK and New Zealand have both labeled Facebook a ‘digital gangster.’  “Facebook is an out-of-control train wreck that is destroying democracy and must be brought under control,” begins a recent Guardian article. “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalized ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” declared British MP Damian Collins.

In the short time since Part 1 of this article was posted (no credit claimed) Zuboff’s empowering message has begun to reach ever a widening audience through two in depth interviews on Democracy Now, a review by Sam Biddle and 90-minute conversation with Naomi Klein on The Intercept and other outlets.

The ‘naming’ part of Dr. Zuboff’s agenda seems to be going well, but a number of factors and actors suggest that the ‘taming’ part may be easier said than done, requiring a mass informed national and, in fact, global movement.

One of the mind-twisting ironies showing the enormity of the challenge is a recent 3-part investigative series by Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal reporting on the Zuboff-Klein conversation event’s sponsor.  They document that The Intercept’s founder and owner, reclusive, SecondLife-addicted, Dalai Lama devotee,  e-bay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, presides over a global network of ‘politically strategic NGOs and media outlets’ – stretching from Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Syria to Ukraine – that advocate for privacy, transparency and journalistic freedom, while simultaneously interfacing with the U.S. surveillance state, supporting ‘regime change’ plots around the world, and supporting the recent rebranding of Neo-con conman Bill Kristol. 

Say the authors, “Behind the image he has cultivated of himself as a ‘progressive philanthropreneur,’ Omidyar has wielded his media empire to advance the Washington consensus in strategic hotspots around the globe.” 

Whom can you trust?

Yasha Levine, the author of Surveillance Valley: The Military History of the Internet – reviewed in Part ! – told Rubinstein & Blumenthal:

“This kind of multi-level approach … is very much inline with Omidyar’s vision for how to use technology to manage society — and make money in the process.  Central to most of his investments is the use of user profiling and behavioral tracking to manage and run all areas of modern life: journalism, transportation, banking and finance, and government administration. To him it’s not just about running a single service, but integrating things together to give technocrats, business executives and government officials a God’s-eye view of the world — to manage and control society more efficiently.”

As Levine spells it out in his book,

“Today the Internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life. We read books on the Internet: bank, shop and play games on the internet. We talk on the phone, attend college, find jobs, flirt, work, listen to music, view movies and make dentist appointments, and get psychological counseling on the Internet. Air conditioners, phones, watches, pet food dispensers, baby monitors, cars, refrigerators, televisions, light bulbs – they all connect to the internet, too. The world’ poorest places may lack plumbing and electricity, but they, sure enough, have access to the Internet.  The Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt but it bluntly; “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”

Naomi Klein, in the conversation with Shoshana Zuboff cited above, suggests that surveillance capitalism and its enabling infrastructures and institutions can be seen as the final phase of the Enclosure Movement, begun in Britain two centuries ago.  A series of ‘Enclosure Acts’ passed by a Parliament controlled by land owners, declared that the forests and fields that had historically been the shared ‘commons’ of the peasantry for farming, grazing, wood-gathering and raw materials, would now be ‘enclosed,’ or privatized for elite profit.  Peasants, farmers, artisans, craftspeople were forcibly driven off their ancestral lands. Their villages burned, their livelihoods destroyed, they were driven into the cities to work in the ’satanic mills’ of newly rising industrial capitalism. It was efficient population control for the profit of the few. Dispossession without representation.  Fast forward to the present ‘Capitalocine,’ when the ‘enclosure’ of the entire planet by profit-seeking, elite forces is at hand.

Zuboff points in her book to the “immense power of a company such as Facebook that routinely manipulates user behavior at scale, using means that are indecipherable and therefor incontestable.” (Just click that ‘agree’ box and become a data slave.) It is, she says, an ‘economics of action beyond the reach of established law and social norms.”  She warns, “They know everything about us. We know nothing about them.” That, in a nutshell, is the essential anti-democratic power asymmetry we face.

“The Behavioral Futures Market” – Commodification of Mass Behavior

The ability of data-gathering to not only track and predict mass behavior, but also modify it to suit commercial profit-making purposes, has created what Zuboff calls ’the behavioral futures market’ – trade in mass behavior outcomes using ‘prediction products.’  If you could modify the weather, investing in ‘weather futures’ would be risk-free.  If you can drive the public’s behavior, investment in ‘behavioral futures’ likewise becomes a sure bet. And if you can drive commercial outcomes, why not use the same methods to drive political outcomes, too.  Enter Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct British outfit now being investigated for its role in the Brexit and U.S. elections, and its growing field of competitors.

The U.S. 2016 election marked the shift from mass digital behavioral modification for commercial purposes to digital behavior-mod for political purposes – from dispossession of our private data to disenfranchisement of informed democratic choice.

Now comes 5G – the Evil Eye in the Sky – being imposed by a federal agency charged with protecting the public interest.

The Telecom ‘Coup from Above’ – The ‘Final Phase of Enclosure?’

The current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the very model of a ‘captured regulatory agency.’  

Presently headed by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai, the FCC has been aggressively issuing rules and rulings that blatantly advance the interests of the telecom industry at the expense of public safety and democratic choice by attempting to pre-empt local, county and state decision-making authority. Ending net neutrality, promoting the Internet of Things (IoT) and the mass build-out of 5G wireless system is at the top of its ’surveillance-industrial-complex’ agenda.

On February 11, 2019 , President Trump signed an Executive Order supporting the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the technology that makes surveillance capitalism possible.

A February 12, 2019 article on Health Impact News was headlined “20,000 Satellites for 5G to be Launched Sending Focused Beams of Intense Microwave Radiation Over Entire Earth.” It reported that the companies with the biggest plans to deploy 5G satellites in the coming months are:

• SpaceX: 12,000 satellites
• OneWeb: 4,560 satellites
• Boeing: 2,956 satellites
• Spire Global: 972 satellites

This is in addition to a global telecom industry push to deploy ground-based, so-called ’small cell’ 5G transmitters every few yards in communities and neighborhoods in the U.S. and around the world, making the surveillance capitalism infrastructure even more powerful and ubiquitous. As the ground-based infrastructure build-out becomes more visible to more people, awareness of its risks to democracy and public health is growing nationally and internationally, and so is public push-back.

Katherine Kheel, editor of WhatIs5g.info, puts the issues clearly,

Our data is fodder for artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is completely dependent on data. The more granular the data, the more capable the AI. 

Our data is most easily harvested with wireless connections as we can be tracked 24/7 – wherever we go and whatever we do. 

Wireless networks (smart phones and such) stalk us enabling 24/7 tracking us and harvesting our data. (Data is even collected while people are asleep!!) IoT vehicles and “driverless cars” will gather yet more data wirelessly. 

Wired networks such as fiber-to-the-home are stationary so not nearly as desirable to industry as wireless. With wired Internet and Telecommunications technology, industry and government miss out on much of our day. 

4g/5g “small cells” are needed to feed AI more data. 

In fact, THE AGGRESSIVE PUSH FOR 4G/5G TOWERS – THE SO-CALLED “RACE TO 5G” – IS DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY A DESIRE TO CAPTURE AS MUCH OF OUR DATA AS CONCEIVABLY POSSIBLE FOR AI AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES SUCH AS TARGETED MARKETING, GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE, LAW ENFORCEMENT, ETC.

With Trump now calling for “continued American leadership in AI” and claiming we need AI for “maintaining the economic and national security of the United States”, this recent Executive Order is bad news for us all, and will likely be used to support the FCC, Congress, States and industry’s preemption program.

And ‘privacy’ is only part of the issue. As a recent Senate hearing and relentless grilling of telecom executives by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) makes clear, the biological effects of 5g have never been proven safe. Yet the global roll-out continues without bio-impact testing; a global biological experiment on un-informed, mis-informed and non-consenting subjects.

Proven Bio-Effects of WiFi
According to Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, “The telecommunications industry has suppressed damaging evidence about its technology since at least 1927.” 

By 1971, US Naval Officer Zori Glazer, working for the Office of Naval Research, was able to assemble an extensive bibliography of over 100 known biological impacts from exposure to RF radiation in over 16 different categories.

Current independent, peer reviewed scientific research leaves no doubt that the impact of EMR on all biological systems – including humans, wildlife, insects and vegetation – need to be taken seriously before its too late.

Blanketing the planet in 24/7 microwave radiation will mean no human or other lifeforms will be able to escape its biological effects. There will be no place to hide, no refuge from the electro-magnetic storm.

Yet the alternative – a global backbone of fiber-optic cable, combined with vastly reduced, only essential mobile WiFi – is cheaper, safer and more secure.  Any guesses as to why this option is it not being more widely pursued?

Amazon’s Core Business is Surveillance
The recent brouhaha surrounding the National Enquirer’s attempt to blackmail Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has further exposed the extent to which the surveillance business model permeates firms at the top of U.S. companies. 

Writes the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, “the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.”

Globalized Surveillance Capitalism

The U.S. may deserve both credit and blame for creating surveillance capitalisms backbone, but US entities of the cyber-security-industrial complex no longer dominate the field. Every nation and their public-private start-up sectors that can are rushing to compete.  A major incubator of this boom is Israel and its intelligence service Mossad, especially Unit 8200.  

As a 2016 Forbes article Inside Israel’s Secret Startup Machine reports, Unit 8200 has a highly efficient way of identifying and developing teenagers who demonstrate the required set of aptitudes. One alumnus of the system reports, “Unit 8200 can take the top 1% of the 1% of the country.” 

Forbes estimates that “the unit has, at any given time, 5,000 people assigned to it, all mandated to deploy the latest technology, often in life-or-death situations, with surprisingly little guidance.”

Teams of teenage recruits are rigorously trained, then assigned tough tasks, told to ’think out of the box,’ and given the freedom to work with little supervision. After a few years, those staffers are replaced with young newcomers and move on to become entrepreneurs, launching startups in the private sector.

Says one Unit 8200 alumnus, “Just from my generation, there are more than 100 guys from the unit that I personally knew who built startups and sold them for a lot of money.”  According to Forbes, “more than 1,000 companies have been founded by 8200 alumni, from Waze to Check Point to Mirabilis, the parent company of ICQ. Tech giants like to gobble up 8200 firms like hors d’oeuvres. In the last three years alone, Microsoft MSFT +1.23% bought Adallom, a data privacy firm, for a reported $320 million; Facebook FB -0.88% bought mobile analytics company Onavo for some $150 million; and PayPal grabbed CyActive, which predicts hacks, for an estimated $60 million.

Some Unit 8200 veterans also founded the ‘Private Mossads,’ so-called ‘influence management’ outfits like Black Cube, Psy-Group and their lesser-known relatives.  They focus on using social media, fake news websites and artificial on-line cyber-personae or ‘avatars,’ to shape public perception and mass behavior, a service for which there is growing global demand.  As one company motto puts it, “Perception is reality.”  

It’s a Wild West-like lawless international environment. The explosion of this domain has outrun public awareness, much less oversight, understanding and regulation.  As one startup founder observes, “I’m coming from the side of the influencer, who really understands how we can make use of online platforms. There needs to be more regulation, and it’s up to our legislators, in each and every country. What have U.S. legislators done since they learned, more than two years ago, about the potential of these new capabilities? They have the power to move the needle from A to B. Nothing substantial has been done, as far as I know.”

Says another startup founder, “This is the challenge of our time. Everything is fake. It’s unbelievable.”  Adds another,  “In order to understand where we are, we have to understand where we started. What started as a noble cause ended up as fake news. What you have today is a flooded market, with people that will, basically, do anything.”

Its no secret that the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) expends major efforts to influence U.S. politics. With Israel being a key hub of the global ‘influence industry,’ and a major source of highly-trained ‘influencers,’ how unlikely is it that some of their companies, along with operatives from other countries  – and competing factions within the U.S. – will be providing their services in the upcoming 2020 election?

New analysis by the pro-democracy tech firm Guardians.ai finds that, “we can conclusively state that a large group of suspicious accounts that were active in one of the largest influence operations of the 2018 cycle is now engaged in sustained and ongoing activity for the 2020 cycle.”

From Surveillance Capitalism to Surveillance Philanthropy –
Planetir and the World Food Program  

Palantir is a company co-founded by Republican billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel with start-up funds supplied by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital division.  Its software has helped the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identify and deport immigrants.

Tolkin fans will remember ‘palantir’ as the evil orb used by the dark lord Sauron to surveille, manipulate and dominate Middle Earth.  Nothing like putting your agenda right out there, hidden in plain sight.

The U.K.’s signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – a key hub in the ‘Five Eyes’ multi-nation surveillance network in which the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada all participate – enthused about Palantir as “having been funded not only by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital branch, but furthermore created ‘through [an] iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.’

Recently the California-based software firm and the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced a five-year $45 million partnership.   According to the news outlet IRIN, a humanitarian data analyst commented, “WFP is jumping headlong into something they don’t understand, without thinking through the consequences, and the U.N. has put no frameworks in place to regulate it.”

Privacy International commented, “The recipients of WFP aid are already in extremely vulnerable situations; they should not be put at additional risk of harm or exploitation.” One Privacy International researcher called the deal “breathtaking, and terrifying.”

A system that not only tracks and predicts, but also modifies and steers individual and mass behavior for private profit as well as elite social and political control constitutes an intolerable technocratic tyranny at odds with human rights and even survival.

In what it calls “an experiment to test its cyberdefence capabilities,” Russia has announced plans to disconnect from the World Wide Web. 

Putin has reportedly called the internet a “CIA project”.  From the foregoing, it seems he is at least partly right.

 

“5G is a War on Humanity”

With the publication by Josh del Sol Beaulieu of a letter to then UN General Secretary Antonio Guterez  written by former UN staffer Claire Edwards we have another indication of the willful ignorance about the dangers of radio-frequency radiation of those making policy decisions about the current  push by telecoms for a global 5G build-out.

“In the first instance,” Edwards points out, “5G is likely to make people electro-hypersensitive (EHS).  Perhaps it was sitting in front of two big computer screens for many of the 18 years I worked at the UN that made me EHS.”

Based on her personal experience, she agreed to serve as editor of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space, addressed to the UN, WHO, EU, Council of Europe and governments of all nations. It reads in part:

We the undersigned scientists, doctors and environmental organizations…urgently call for a halt to the deployment of the 5G (fifth generation) wireless network, including 5G from space satellites. 5G will massively increase exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation on top of the 2G, 3G and 4G networks for telecommunications already in place. RF radiation has been proven harmful for humans and the environment. The deployment of 5G constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law.

The signatories to this Appeal are scientists, doctors and environmental organizations from every continent who have been working tirelessly for many years to call the world’s attention to an invisible assault on us and the entire planetary biosphere.

Everyone — not just scientists and doctors — are now being asked to sign the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space.

To read the Appeal and sign as an individual or organization, go to: International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space

Evidence of Harm Suppressed for Warfare and Corporate Profit –
Soviet Public Safety Standards ‘Too Low’

Canadian researcher Dr. Magda Havas long ago reported that ” The Defense Intelligence Agency of the United States released a document referenced below that had a security classification as “confidential” and has since been “unclassified”.  This document may help us better understand why the U.S. military is interested in opposing a more protective guideline for microwave radiation.”

Adams, R.L. and R.A. Williams.  1976.  Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation (Radiowaves and Microwaves) – Eurasian Communist Countries (U). Prepared by U.S. Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency Office of the Surgeon General and was released by the Defense Intelligence Agency.  34 pp.  Unclassified.

Dr. Havas continued, “There are two disturbing paragraphs in this document that clearly indicate the U.S. military’s perspective opposing more stringent guidelines for microwave radiation.

‘If the more advanced nations of the West are strict in the enforcement of stringent exposure standards, there could be unfavorable effects on industrial output and military function. The Eurasian Communist countries could, on the other hand, give lip service to strict standards, but allow their military to operate without restriction and thereby gain the advantage in electronic warfare techniques and the development of antipersonnel applications.’ [page vii]

‘Should subsequent research result in adoption of the Soviet standard by other countries, industries whose practices are based on less stringent safety regulations, could be required to make costly modifications in order to protect workers. Recognition of the 0.01 mW/cm² standard could also limit the application of new technology by making the commercial exploitation of some products unattractive because of increased cost, imposed by the need for additional safeguards.’[page 24]

“Note that the ‘less stringent safety regulations’ refers to U.S., Canada, Great Britain and several European countries as well as to the guidelines recommended by ICNIRP and WHO. It seems that the authors of this document value military and commercial financial considerations above worker health. There is little doubt that the U.S. military played a key role preventing safer and more protective U.S. guidelines for microwave radiation.

“Microwave weapons are outside the scope of this document, although there is reference to antipersonnel applications of microwave technology including inducing neurological effects, metabolic diseases, heart seizures and neurological pathologies resulting from breaching the blood-brain barrier, as well as intracranial production of sounds and possibly words at very low average power densities.  On page 26, a section dealing with microwave weapons seems to have been removed.

“This document clearly reflects the U.S. military’s resistance to lowering the guideline and their distrust of research conducted in the Eastern Block Countries.  That distrust and the power wielded by the U.S. military is largely responsible for the status of the  current guidelines, which fail to protect public and worker health.”

Dr. Havas has assembled an on-line archive of reports by Naval researcher showing clearly that the dangers of RF, or ‘non-ionizing’ radiation have been known for decades.

Here’s a sobering example:

BIBLIOGPHY OF REPORTED BIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA (‘EFFECTS’) AND CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS ATTRIBUTED TO MICROWAVE AND RADIO-FREQUENCY RADIATION

Zorach R. Glaser, Ph.D. LT, MSC, USNR.  Research ‘Report    Project MF12.524.015-00043,Report No. 2.   Naval Medical Research Institute,  National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland 20014, U.S.A. 4 October 1971, Second Printing, with Revisions, Corrections, and Additions: 20 April 1972 (Supersede3 AD No. 734391)

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/750271.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0JreSVhcmpTR3BfJAQ9dJl0GdoywiVLCtVsIfSfZ-_6OspwcUWWy6YSIU

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Reported Biological Phenomena (*Effects’) and Some Clinical Manifestations Attributed to Microwave and Radio-Frequency Radiation (See Note)

A. Heating of Organs*
(Applications: Diathermy, Electrosurgery, Electrocoagulation, Electrodesiccation, Electrotomy)

Whole Body (temperature regulation defect), Hyperpyreyla
Skin
Bone and Bone Marrow:
(a) Lens of Eye (cataractous lesions – due to the avascular nature of the lens which prevents adequate heat dissipation (b) Corneal damage also possible at extremely high frequencies
Genitalia (tubular degeneration of testicles)
Brain
Sinuses
Metal Implants (burns near hip pins, etc.)
The effects are generally reversible except for 4a.

B. Changes in Cardiovascular Function
Striated Muscle Contraction
Alteration of Diameter of Blood Vessels (increases vascular
elasticity), Dilation
Changes in the Oxidative Processes in Tissues and Organs
Liver Enlargement
Altered Sensitivity to Drug Stimuli
Decreased Spermatogenesis (decreased fertility, to sterility)
Altered Sex Ratio of Births (more girls!)
Altered Menstrual Activity
Altered Fetal Development
Decreased Lactation in Nursing Mothers
Reduction in Diuresis (excretion via urine output)
Altered Renal function (decreased filtration in tubules)
Changes in (conditioned Reflexes
Increased Electrical Resistance of Skin
Changes in the Structure of Skin Receptors of the (a) Receptor and (b) Blood Carrying System
Altered Blood Flow Rate

* It is also reported that low levels of irradiation produce a cooling effect – “hyper-compensation”.

Note: These effects are listed without comment or endorsement since the literature abounds with conflicting reports. In some cases the basis for reporting an “effect” was a single or a non-statistical observation, which may have been drawn from a poorly conceived (and poorly executed) experiment.

Alterations In the Bio-currents (EEG) of the Cerebral Cortex
(in animals)
Changes In the Rate of Clearance of Tagged Ions from Tissue
Reversible Structural Changes In the Cerebral Cortex and the Diencephalon
Electrocardiographic (EKG) Changes
Alterations In Sensitivity to Light, Sound, and Olfactory
Stimuli
Functional (a) and Pathological (b) Changes in the Eyes:
(a) decrease in size of blind spot, altered color recognition,
changes In Intraocular pressure, lacrimation, trembling of eyelids;
(b) less opacity and coagulation, altered tissue respiration,
and altered reduction-oxidation processes
Myocardial Necrosis
Hemorrhage in Lungs, Liver, Gut, and Brain J At Fatal Levels
Generalized Degeneration of all Body Tissue of Radiation
Loss of Anatomical Parts
Death
Dehydration
Altered Rate of Calcification of Certain Tissue

C. Central Nervous System Effects
Headaches
Insomnia
Restlessness (Awake and During Sleep)
Electroencephalographic (EW) Changes
Cranial Nerve Disorders
Pyramidal Tract Lesions
Conditioned Reflex Disorders
Vagominetic Action of the Heart; Sympaticouminetic Action
Seizures, Convulsions

D. Autonomic Nervous System Effects
Neuro-vegetative Disorders (e.g., alteration of heart rhythm)
Fatigue
Structural Alterations Lu the Synapses of the Vague Nerve
Stimulation of Parasympathetic Nervous System (Bradycardia),
and Inhibition of the Sympathetic Nervous System

Peripheral Nervous System Effects
Effects on Locomotor Nerves

F. Psychological Disorders
(“Human Behavioral Studies”) – the so-called “Psychophysiologic (and Psychosomatic) Responses”

Neurasthenia- (general “bad” feeling)
Depression
Impotence
Anxiety
Lack of Concentration
Dizziness
Hallucinations
Sleepiness
Insomnia
Increased Irritability
Decreased Appetite
Loss of Memory
Scalp Sensations
Increased Fatigability
Chest Pains
Tremor of the Hands

G. Behavioral Changes (Animal Studies)
Reflexive, Operant, Avoidance, and Discrimination Behaviors

H. Mood Disorders
(V = in vivo)
(v = in vitrt.’
Changes in:
Blood and Bone Marrow
Phagorytic (polymorphs) and Bactericidal Functions of the Liver)
Hemolysis Rate (increase), (a shortened lifespan of cells)
Sedimentation Rate (increase), (due to ,-e. ;n sp, t ” I
levels or ar:ount of fitrino-er. (?))
Number of Erythrocytes (decrease)
Blood Glucose Concentration (increase)
Blood Histamine Content
Cholesterol and Lipids
Gamma Globulin, and Total Protein Concentration
Number of Eosinophils
Albumin/Globulin ratio (decrease)
Hemopoiesis (rate of formation of blood corpuscles)
Leukopenia (increase in number of white cells), and Leukocytosis
Reticulocytosis

I. Vascular Disorders
Thrombosis
Hypertension

J. Enzyme and Other Biochemical Changes
Changes in activity of:
Cholinesterase (V,v)
Phosphatase (v)
Transaminase (v)
Amylase (v)
Carboxydismutase
Protein Denaturation
Toxin, Fungus, and Virus Inactivation (at high radiation dose
levels), Bacteriostatic Effect
Tissue Cultures Killed
Alteration In Rate of Cell Division
Increased Concentration of RVA in Lymphocytes, and Decreased
Concentration in Brain,. Liver, and Spleen
Changes in Pyruvic Acid, Lactic Acid, and Creatinine Exeretions
Change in Concentration of Glycogen in Liver (Hyperglycemia)
Alteration in Concentration of 17- Ketosterolds in Urine

K. Metabolic Disorders
Glycosuria (sugar in urine; related with blood sugar?)
Increase in Urinary Phenol (derivatives? DOPA?)
Alteration of rate of Metabolic Enzymatic Processes
Altered Carbohydrate Metabolism

L. Gastro-Intestinal Disorders
Anorexia (loss of appetite)
Epigastric Pain
Constipation
Altered Secretion of Stomach “Digestive Juices”

M. Endocrine Gland Changes
Altered Pituitary Function
Hyperthyroidism
Thyroid Enlargement
Increased Uptake of Radioactive Iodine by Thyroid Gland
Altered Adrenal Cortex Activity
Decreased Corticosteroids in Blood
Decreased Glucocorticoidal Activity
Hypogonadism (usually decreased testosterone production)

N. Histological Changes
Changes in Tubular Epithelium of Testicles
Gross Changes

O. Genetic and Chromosomal Changes
Chromosome Aberrations (e.g., linear shortening, pseudochiasm,
diploid structures, amitotic division, bridging, “sticky”
chromosomes, irregularities in chromosomal envelope)
Mutations =
Mongolism
Somatic Alterations (changes in cell not involving nucleus or
chromosomes, cellular transformation)
Neoplastic Diseases (e.g*, tumors)

P. Pearl Chain Effect
(Intracellular orientation of subcellular particles, and orientation of cellular and other (non-biologic) particles)

Also, orientation of animals, birds, and fish in electromagnetic fields

Q. Miscellaneous Effects
Sparking between dental fillings
Peculiar metallic taste in mouth
Changes in Optical Activity of Colloidal Solutions
Treatment for Syphilis, Poliomyelitis, Skin Diseases
Loss of Hair
Brittleness of Hair
Sensations of Buzzing Vibrations, Pulsations, and Tickling About the Head and Ears
Copious Perspiration, Salivation, and Protrusion of Tongue
Changes in the Operation of Implanted Cardiac Pacemakers
Changes in Circadian Rhythms

 

 

By James Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan – EON

“Unlike some countries, we do not believe we should spend the next couple of years studying what 5G should be, how it should operate, and how to allocate spectrum, based on those assumptions…. Turning innovators loose is far preferable to expecting committees and regulators to define the future.” – U.S. Federal Communications Commission  former Chairman Tom Wheeler (June, 2016)

“The deployment of 5G constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law.”  –  International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. (2018)

5G – A Wonderful, Wireless World… or, a Looming Global Public Health Conflagration?

“If the telecommunications industry’s plans for 5G come to fruition, no person, no animal, no bird, no insect and no plant on Earth will be able to avoid exposure, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to levels of RF radiation that are tens to hundreds of times greater than what exists today, without any possibility of escape anywhere on the planet. These 5G plans threaten to provoke serious, irreversible effects on humans and permanent damage to all of the Earth’s ecosystems.”  So begins the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space.

Creeping Telecom Coup 

The attempted telecommunications industry take-over that began with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is now nearing completion as the industry-captured Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues ever more rules restricting the rights of local elected bodies to regulate the build-out of public health-endangering and local authority-usurping 5G wireless technology – both ground- and space-based.

September 26, 2018, the FCC voted to ‘streamline’ the process for installation of their next generation technology, 5G.

From MDSafetech.org: “Far from being mobile, this technology will depend on thousands of  fixed “small cell” antennae throughout cities and residential neighborhoods, about 300 meters (~1000 feet) apart. In order to function, these short wavelength radiofrequencies (6-100 Gigahertz or GHz) will be pulsing at billions of times a second (1GHz=1 Billion cycles /sec) and will be continuously emitting radiation 24 hours a day.  In a addition, a newer technology which is used in the military for early warning missile radar systems, PAVE PAWS, is incorporated into these systems called phased arrays, whereby more powerful built in “beam steering” arrays scan back and forth from tower to device and from device to tower for easier connection with an individual’s movement, similar to the missile systems. Phased arrays are also used in AM and FM radio broadcast stations and proposed for automotive radar sensing.  The cell phones will operate with higher power and shielding for electrical interference but no apparent shielding for the user.  There has been no premarket testing for health or environmental harm. “

[ Download PDF ] (Developed by Paige Hutson)

Contrary to widespread misconception, 5G has nothing to do with better cell phone coverage or emergency response communication.  The ‘small cells’ are definitely not aimed just for personal wireless services, like phones. It’s aimed at providing the internet of things connectivity and HD video wirelessly to homes and offices.  And contrary to the claim that due to being blocked by trees, buildings, etc., the ‘small’ cells must be placed very close together (every 300 meters) and adjacent to homes, businesses, schools, parks, etc., Verizon’s CEO says they’ve “busted that myth.” 

“We busted the myth that foliage will shut it down. I mean that was back in the days when a pine needle would stop it. That does not happen. And these things — in the 200 feet from a home, we’re now designing the network for over 2,000 feet from transmitter to receiver, which has a huge impact on our capital need going forward. So those myths have disappeared. We’re charging ahead.” (May, 2018)

Continue reading →

 

Reprinted from the Pt. Reyes Light:

War gaming the science on cell phones and health risks: A conversation with journalist Mark Dowie

We’ve been documenting the development of wireless microwave devices and the independent science on its effects for the past 20 years. So we were delighted by a recent confluence of events: the release of the National Toxicology Program peer-reviewed study and the publication of an article in The Nation, “How Big Wireless Convinced Us Our Cell Phones Are Safe,” focused on how industry war-gamed the science.Soon after, a major study was released in Italy that replicated the results of the National Toxicology Project study. Both found that the same rare cancers appeared in animal subjects exposed to both high and low levels of radio frequency electromagnetic radiation.We couldn’t resist interviewing Inverness resident Mark Dowie about all of it. Mark is a celebrated investigative reporter and historian, the author of many books, the winner of at least 19 journalism awards, a former publisher and editor of Mother Jones Magazine and the co-author with Mark Hertsgaard of the recent Nation article. Here is our conversation.

Jim: How did you decide to write this story?

Mark: [Mark] Hertsgaard, who’s the investigative editor of The Nation, asked me to do a big story on cell phones. I looked at the literature and found that cell phones have been beaten to death. It’s a shop-worn story, impossible to advance.

So I said, “I think the story is how industry has been war gaming science”—‘war gaming’ is their term, not mine—and gave him the history going back to military research that was done on microwaves during the Cold War, then up to the present, and how so much of it has been suppressed, classified, hidden and distorted by wireless defenders who tore pages from the playbooks of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, then used the same P.R. firms, the same law firms. All to do the same thing: manufacture doubt about the harmfulness of this technology. Hertsgaard said, “Okay. Let’s go with that.”

Jim:  Did you find anything surprising that you didn’t expect?

Continue reading →

‘Smart’ Meters, Forced Wireless Phones and Pulsed Microwave Emitters Everywhere!

by Mary Beth Brangan

We have three huge new emerging sources of pulsed microwave emissions:

1) The telecom industry push to install millions more microwave emitting antennas and to completely remove any antenna regulation at National, state and local levels.  Here in California it’s written in SB 649 that’s already passed by the Senate and looking like it’s going to sail through the Assembly. (as of June 26.)

2) AT&T is in the process of eliminating landlines, forcing wireless phones for those in its territories.

3) Utilities installing ‘smart’ meters on homes and businesses, schools and stores that pulse microwaves thousands of times per day non-stop.

The timelines for these three are slightly different, but all will combine in the next few years – unless we stop them.

1. The Problem: Telecoms are De-regulating Themselves

The wireless industry wants full control of the process of placing millions more cell antennas for transmitting microwaves for 4G and 5G products.  They feel the local city and county discretion of cell tower placement and legal compliance is too onerous since there will be so many.  Voila!  Write legislation that removes local jurisdiction. So the Telecoms wrote boiler plate legislation co-authored through ALEC as well as enlisting help from Trump.  These bills have been introduced into a few states so far.  Ohio passed their bill but then 80 Ohio cities sued the state over its removal of their local authority.

California’s bill is SB 649 which is designed to allow 4G/5G equipment – very powerful two-way microwave-transmitters to be placed on virtually every utility pole, light pole even non pole structures in the public rights-of-way in both commercial and residential zones.  The bill will also allow ‘associated equipment’ power supply cabinets right on the sidewalk as large as 35 cubic feet next to each pole or non-pole mounted microwave transmitter.  5G would deploy multiple centimeter and millimeter microwaves and RF/MW radiation that has been heavily tested by scientists.  Much of it is now declassified military research in the public domain.

Certain sized 5G waves (from 28 GHz to 90 GHz) do not penetrate buildings or human tissue as deeply as 4G microwaves – they concentrate their energy on the outer surfaces of buildings or living organisms (skin, eyes, ears.)  These smaller 5G waves don’t travel as far as 4G waves and thus require closely spaced cell towers.

Nearly 150 cities and counties in California oppose SB 649 as well as the League of California Cities; we sincerely hope California’s League of Cities will also sue if the legislation passes.

 

Electro-Magnetic Denialism

Legislators and Telecoms continue to assume no biological effects exist from pulsing microwaves and continue to ignore the following facts.

SB 649 ignores the California Constitution. The California Constitution declares safety an inalienable right, yet SB 649 mandates compulsory microwave exposure for the public – for men, for women, for children, for pregnant women, for infants, for the elderly, for the infirm and disabled, for those already disabled by electromagnetic sensitivities (EMS) caused by overexposure. (We know many of these unfortunate people.) It is rolling out a new level of microwave-emitting infrastructure without informed consent, increasing public exposure dramatically.

Disability due to electromagnetic sensitivity (EMS) was recognized by the U.S. Access Board in 2002. SB 649 ignores this. SB 649 also ignores a 1998 survey by the California Department of Health Services finding 3.2% of respondents were very sensitive or allergic to EMF. That was over 1 million Californians in 1998 when RF exposure levels were much lower. There is no current prevalence data for EMS in California.

Already existing pulsed microwave emission exposures to the public are sickening growing numbers daily. That number is surely much greater now in 2017 with the ongoing explosion of microwave transmitters and emissions from devices like ‘smart’ meters, ’smart’ phones, wi-fi, baby monitors, I-pads and tablets, geoengineering, weather modification, electronic surveillance and directed energy weaponry.

This is happening despite a mass of well documented and peer-reviewed research on the serious public health and safety concerns from increasing and widespread electromagnetic pollution. Risks include: lack of safety and privacy; growing numbers of digital dementia, sickened, disabled people, plants and wildlife caused by RF/EMF.

California Fire Fighters realize the severe health risks from these pulsed microwave emitters and have negotiated a deal to prevent them from being placed on Fire Houses.  We want our essential Fire Fighters to be protected, yet we all deserve protection.  The Fire Fighters asked for and received an exemption based on negative health effects from RF/MW radiation exposures.  The basis for this is the 2004 brain study of California Fire Fighters which showed brain abnormalities, cognitive impairment, delayed reaction time and lack of impulse control in all firefighters tested.

In California, SB 649 has already been passed by the state Senate and is being rushed through the Assembly. Amendments June 20 have changed this from a seriously dangerous bill to a horrific one.

SB 649 amendments would open the right of way to macro cell towers, as well as “small cells” on utility poles, without regulation, and the bill preempts regulation of broadband over powerline.

 

Although SB649 proponents claim a huge financial bonanza from additional microwave emitting antenna deployment, there is no objective evidence to support this claim. The cell phone industry is a mature industry: everyone who wants a cell phone already has one.  Driverless cars and the Internet of Things are some of the new uses being visioned by industry.  The frequencies used by 5G are also used by the Dept. of Defense crowd control weapon, ‘Active Denial’ that works by inflicting unbearable pain, as if your body is on fire.

Millions more cell towers would be along every street, every 4 to 10 homes at second story levels and lower. Multiple antennas could be placed on each pole, with emissions that can reach 5 miles. Yet, current recommendations are for at least 1,500 foot set-backs from people, homes, medical facilities, fire and police facilities, elder care facilities, schools and wilderness areas from a single antenna 200 ft. high.  However, with SB 649, microwave exposures may be as close as 12 to 15 ft. and possibly from multiple antennas.

Several studies from around the world show people within the first 500 ft. of a microwave emitting antenna have much higher adverse health effects, including cancer.  Once again, children, pregnant women, the ill, the elderly and those already injured by overexposure are most vulnerable.  There will be no where to escape from these microwave emissions.

What you can do:    Contact your Assembly Members URGENTLY to oppose SB 649. Contact info: http://alcl.assembly.ca.gov/membersstaff & http://acom.assembly.ca.gov/membersstaff.  It would also be very helpful to urge opposition to be expressed from any major organizations you may be members of, or fund.

If letters in opposition to SB 649 are sent before 1:30 pm JUNE 28, they should be sent to:

Assembly Member Cecilia M. Aguiar-Curry,
Chair of the Local Government Committee
1020 N Street, Room 157
Sacramento, California 95814

RE: SB 649 Wireless and Small Cell Telecommunications Facilities (amended 6/20/2017)
Strongly Oppose

MUST be emailed  to Angela.mapp@asm.ca.gov, dixie.petty@asm.ca.gov, Nidia Bautista <nidia.bautista@sen.ca.gov>

Here’s our joint letter of opposition from EON and EMFSafetyNetwork PDF

2)  The Problem: In areas that were strenuously opposing, ‘Smart’ meters are again being forced onto homes. 

PG&E is again forcing homeowners to allow installation of harmful ‘smart’ meters on homes in West Marin, Fairfax and other areas that previously had moratoriums against it.  These electronic meters pulse microwave radiation that travels 2 miles and emits thousands of times per day, non-stop, 24/7, 365 days per year.  Because a neighbor’s meter emissions can penetrate adjacent homes, EON, along with others, argued for Community-wide opt out in a special proceeding at the California Public Utilities Commission.  The corrupt Commission, however, merely pretended that was not part of the discussion and ruled against us, though it was clearly defined in the initial proceeding scope.

What you can do: Unfortunately, all we can do now is to ‘opt out’ though we never opted in to such a dangerous scheme in the first place.  You must contact PG&E to refuse the ‘smart’ meter, or AMI, or any electronic meter (they call them different names) and pay the fees that we consider extortion because you will be paying to not have a harmful meter on your own home.  Various legal challenges have been made over the past years, but the courts always refer the challenges back to the CPUC.  You must pay the $75 up front charge and agree to pay $10 extra per month for three years.  If you change addresses or names on your electric bill, the whole process starts over, according to PG&E rules.  Customers enrolled in the CPUC’s low income program (California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE)) electing to opt-out will be assessed an initial fee of $10 and a monthly charge of $5. 

If you can get your neighbors to agree to opt out too, it will be more protective against the harmful pulsed microwaves that transfer into your house wiring and cause pulsing out from between 3 and 8 feet out from the wires in your walls.

3) The Problem: AT&T wants to stop servicing their copper wires and eliminate their landline service.

Many AT&T customers depend on landlines for service; small businesses, the elderly, the hard of hearing, the poor.  Landlines are essential in situations when the electrical power is down for any length of time, since they still operate when cell and smart phones do not.  Tellingly, after a recent natural disaster, Florida’s governor pleaded with people to preserve their landlines. Landlines are essential for emergency calls, since your location isn’t transmitted automatically when calling 911 on a cell phone.

19 states voted to allow AT&T to discontinue landlines.  California did not; in 2016 state legislators voted against AT&T dropping this legacy service.  Too many people rely on it, despite widespread use of cell phones.  Yet AT&T is beginning their process anyway which is slated to be finished by 2020.

This last May, 2017, AT&T customers across the country, including California, found an Amendment to their Service Agreement insert in their bills warning that if AT&T wanted to install electrical equipment on their premises, they must allow them as well as agreeing to both pay the extra for the equipment and pay for the electricity to operate it.  If you did not agree to this, AT&T warned, your telephone service may be disconnected.  The deadline AT&T gave was July 1, 2017.  Many people didn’t recognize the small insert as anything other than advertising and didn’t even read it.  This is an attempt by AT&T to abandon reliable copper landlines and a ‘forced migration’ to AT&T’s digital U-verse service, forcing an Opt-in by default. (According to one AT&T service rep.)

What you can do: 
1.) Call AT&T, 800-288-2020. ask for a center manager, let them know you object to the loss of your landline. You must contact and complain to AT&T before filing a complaint with the CPUC.

2.) File an official complaint with the CPUC, https://appsssl.cpuc.ca.gov/cpucapplication/, get a file number for that complaint if you do it online, or ask for a confirmation number if you complain by phone. 3.) Do not allow AT&T to install any new equipment on your property without full disclosure of what it is, what it does, and how it differs from your current service. 4.) Mark any payments to AT&T paid under protest.  You could also say ‘no forced migration’ and ‘keep my landline.’

Tell the CPUC’s complaint department:  Customers are being threatened and misinformed by the rogue activity of AT&T. Customers should be told exactly what equipment is involved, what is planned, what their options are, a resource for getting help or information, and what portions of what contractual relationships or agreements AT&T is using to justify their actions. Please, CAB, take action against these errors. The CPUC should fine AT&T make them issue corrective Notices and apologies. Please, respond to me and give me a file number for this complaint. (this info is for an informal complaint) Thank you.

You can also file a formal CPUC complaint.  But the BEST method is to appear before the formal agenda begins at the regular CPUC business meetings and speak your mind.  That’s the only sure way to be heard in this system.

If you want to keep your landline, NOW is the time to fight to save it. Pass this information on to others as it is being done surreptitiously.

You can download a pdf of the EON PowerPoint presentation on these issues for sharing in your community.

_______________________________________

From Friends in Illinois:

Who will pay the price for AT&Ts aggressive push to end traditional landline service?
Seniors
Businesses
Working Families
People with health issues
Disabled and blind
Residents of rural areas
Individuals who want a choice
Loss of reliable 911 emergency services

Why is the loss of traditional, reliable landlines a travesty to all residents and businesses? 911 emergency services will not work during a power outage. This is critical for everyone concerned. All phone service available, including AT&T U-verse, requires electricity to operate the equipment. Even cell phones need to be charged, which is not possible during extended power outages.

Before the last hurricane in Florida, the Governor was repeating on TV and radio announcements, “Get a landline! Keep and maintain a landline.”

During Hurricane Sandy the only residents that could stay in touch with others were the ones who could use landlines. All communication devices dependent on electricity were useless. Cell phones could not be charged and computer-based phone lines dependent on a cable modem, would not work without electricity.

Illinois may not get hurricanes, but the state has had its share of floods, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms that caused power outages.

AARP says,

“Recent wireless 911 outages show that telecommunications companies have yet to offer a viable alternative for a significant number of customers. In March, for example, a wireless 911 outage hit AT&T wireless customers in 14 states for about five hours, forcing police departments to urge people to call alternative numbers in an emergency.”

AT&T motive for dismantling copper-wired landlines
AT&Ts reason for aggressively pushing legislation through the General Assembly is to release the corporation from the responsibility for maintaining copper-wired phone lines. AT&Ts agenda: Move customers to computer-based (VoIP) phone services. For the consumer this means using a high speed Internet connection through a cable modem which runs on electricity.

Citizens Utility Board says,

“AT&T, which made $13 billion in profits in 2016, wants the power to end traditional phone service and force customers to use computer-based or wireless substitutes. That could subject those customers to higher bills and unreliable service.”

“AT&T claims that its 1.2 million business and residential landline customers have viable alternatives to traditional servic . . . for many people — including seniors, low-income families and rural residents — home phone service is the most reliable, affordable lifeline to vital services such as 911, home security systems and medical monitoring devices.”

No reliable alternatives to landline phone services
A U. S. Senator leading the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (which has jurisdiction over the FCC) writes to a constituent:

“For decades, Americans have counted on the nation’s landline communications network and its reliability. Even in a time of great change in our communications networks, I agree that landline voice service is an important service. In fact, many people do not realize that wireless communications networks themselves rely upon the availability of landline communications networks to function effectively. It is critical that consumers are protected during this technological change and that new networks provide the same level of reliability as our legacy landline infrastructure.”

AT&T’s alternative, computer-based VoIP, does not provide the same level of reliability. U-verse is NOT a viable alternative.

Professionals and businesses that require secure phone service count on landlines. Law firms, real estate offices, medical facilities, government offices, and financial institutions use landlines because they are cyber-secure and not connected to the Internet. During a power outage, these businesses have to continue providing consumers with vital services. For cyber-secure, uninterrupted phone service, landlines are the only viable option.

Warnings from AARP:
Forcing people onto alternatives, such as wireless or computer-based phone service, could subject them to higher bills, lack of service in extended power outages, spotty reception and dropped calls.

Landline telephone service allows residents to have reliable access to emergency services; it helps low-income families to connect with job opportunities; it helps small businesses to stay in business and connect with new opportunities and customers; and it allows older residents and residents in rural areas to stay connected to family, friends, and neighbors, as well as vital services. Furthermore, [landline telephone service] saves callers millions of dollars by having access to affordable calling plans.

“Those who depend on home phone service shouldn’t have that choice stripped away.”