Description
In this wonderful example of home-brewed video reporting from Vermont’s Center for Media and Democracy (CCTV), a panel of researchers and professionals discuss the dangers of wireless technology. From artists being affected by this technology to doctors researching the affects of wireless radiation on children in schools and adults in your home. Listen to these experienced members of the panel and others on the phone and chiming in from the internet about why you should be cautious about wireless technology. To get more involved and to learn more visit: www.emrpolicy.org www.emfsafetynetwork.org https://sagereports.com/smart-meter-rf/
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Six California counties and twenty-four cities and towns now have anti-SMeter laws. For a complete list go to StopSmartMeters.org
City of Monterey Demands PG&E Halt SmartMeters
KION-TV MONTEREY, Calif. – On Tuesday night, the City of Monterey unanimously adopted a resolution to try and stop PG&E from installing SmartMeters.
The Flaw in Obama’s Wireless Plan
The President hopes an increase in Internet access will result in more economic development. Fiber networks would do that better than mobile broadband. By Brendan Greeley – Business Week
[ Cartoon by Brian Narell NarellCreative.com ]
For California cities and counties opposing smart meters go here.
For anti-smart meter campaigns in other states, go here.
Protesters call for blockage of PG&E’s new SmartMeters in San Francisco
by Dan Schreiber – Examiner Staff Writer
[ Says November Alexis, one of this protest’s organizers of this piece: ‘The article is kind, but FULL of inaccuracies…jeez…someone needs to show this boy how to collect facts and communicate them properly!!’ ]
Your gas meter: The new frontline in cyberwar
By Mic Wright – Wired UK
By the end of 2020, the government wants every home in the UK to be fitted with a smart meter. The device, as part of a networked system of localised power distribution, allows consumers to control their consumption and — more contentiously — also lets utilities companies monitor real-time usage. The £8 billion scheme is being sold as a way for the average household to cut its energy bills by an estimated £28 per year.
But could such a banal technology in fact be fraught with danger? In July 2009 — five months before the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) announced the initiative — security firm IOActive demonstrated a worm that could rapidly spread through a smart-grid network, disabling meters as it went. The experiment proved what many cybersecurity experts already knew: hackers distributing the right malware could shut down the network. Britain would go dark….
Naperville addressing concerns with Smart Grid
By Justin Kmitch – Daily Herald
Naperville City Council members unanimously approved a Smart Grid Bill of Rights, but not before attempting to quell the fears of about a dozen residents.
Several residents, a few of whom claimed to have just learned about the city’s Smart Grid initiative, asked the city on Tuesday to impose a yearlong moratorium on installing the grid so more could be learned about any harmful side effects.
Radiation effect must be checked before 4G system is okayed
By JUDY SIEGEL AND EHUD ZION WALDOKS – Jerusalem Post
Israel – Officials say upgrading infrastructure to for 4G cellular phones could increase use of such technologies and increase public’s exposure to radiation.
Boffin’s wave claim after suicide spate
by Kerry-Lynne Doyle, Glamorgan Gazette – Wales
MOBILE phones and wireless internet could be behind Bridgend’s growing suicide rate, according to a microwave expert.
Barrie Trower said he is “99 per cent sure” Bridgend’s 13 suspected suicides are a result of waves from mobile phones, wi-fi and pagers.
Mr Trower, a scientific adviser to the Radiation Research Trust, said he is convinced the deaths are related to an illness caused by the waves after investigating five suicide “clusters” across the UK and Ireland.
He is contacting Bridgend Local Health Board and Bridgend County Borough Council to ask them to discuss the issue with him.
Mr Trower is willing to visit Bridgend to speak about the problem.
“I am 99 per cent sure,” said Mr Trower, who contributed to the BBC Panorama programme WiFi: A Warning Signal. “I think I can link them all together and I think it’s a viable reason to look into. We know the suicide rates are rising. The increase in suicides does match the speed of low level microwaves. It’s happening in every country in the world, not just Bridgend.”
Mr Trower has been researching the effects of microwaves since the 1960s and addressed the Welsh Assembly on the issue two years ago.
He has investigated links between 182 suicides and electrosensitivity, a condition thought to affect three per cent of the population….
Prominent scientist reveals possible EM connection to suicides
by Lucy Johnston(Sunday Express)
THE spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.
Dr Roger Coghill, who sits on a Government advisory committee on mobile radiation, has discovered that all 22 youngsters who have killed themselves in Bridgend, South Wales, over the past 18 months lived far closer than average to a mast [cell tower].
He has examined worldwide studies linking proximity of masts to depression. Dr Coghill’s work is likely to trigger alarm and lead to closer scrutiny of the safety of masts, which are frequently sited on public buildings such as schools and hospitals.
Largest Study Finds Evidence Of Association Between EMFs And Exposed Worker Suicide
ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2000) — CHAPEL HILL — A large and detailed study of the possible link between exposure to low frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and suicide among electric utility workers has uncovered what appears to be a distinct association.
Cell Phone Emissions Excite The Brain Cortex
Electromagnetic fields from cell phones excite the brain cortex adjacent to it, with potential implications for individuals with epilepsy, or other neurological conditions. This finding is published in Annals of Neurology, a journal by John Wiley & Sons. The article is also available online via Wiley Interscience.
Alcatel-Lucent gadget may topple cell towers
Bloomberg Businessweek
Almost everything electronic – modems, PCs, cell phones – becomes dramatically smaller and more powerful each year. Not cell towers. They’re still big, ugly, and expensive. Most were designed with the simple goal of transmitting plain old phone calls, so towers are easily overwhelmed by smart-phone users who now want to not only call grandma, but also upload stream TV shows.
The current solution to network congestion is “building bigger and bigger cell towers in more places,” says the president of Alcatel-Lucent’s wireless division, Wim Sweldens. But that’s cost-prohibitive in vast rural expanses and pretty much impossible in dense urban areas.
On Feb. 7, Alcatel-Lucent introduced a device called lightRadio that could help bring an end to the bigger-is-better approach. Most of today’s cell towers are 200-foot monsters. Each lightRadio unit measures 2.5 inches across and weighs just 10.5 ounces. That package contains radios and antennae for each of the major cellular technologies – 2G, 3G, and LTE. Carriers can plop them wherever they need more coverage, as long as an electrical source is available.
Smart water meters continue to fail
By Moneth Deposa – Saipan Tribune
There appears to be nothing smart about the performance of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.’s smart meters.
CUC executive director Abe Utu Malae disclosed that the agency’s efforts to provide all customers with meters that will accurately record water consumption is being hampered by smart meters that are breaking down en masse.
The 1,189 unmetered customers in August 2010 went down to 1,043 in February this year, Malae said, but then 407 smart meters failed in the interim.
He said CUC is now running after its vendor to have the defective units replaced….
===== Please remember, your bite-size contributions on our Donate Page are what help keep us going. You can also send a check made out to EON to EON, POB 1047, Bolinas, CA
by James Heddle, EON – the Ecological Options Network
A coastal village in California is a microcosm of the telecom industry’s assault on public health and democratic choice going on all across the country.
[ Scroll down for a video of the meeting discussed in this article,
or click here to watch it on EON’s YouTube channel. ] Aerial photo of Mesa Park complex from EBI Report. Numbers indicate estimated RF exposure levels
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
To anyone who has taken the trouble to give even a cursory glance at the evidence, the situation is absurd on its face: a two-tower microwave antenna farm smack dab in the center of a public complex containing a health clinic, fire hall, childrens’ playground, skateboard park, two baseball diamonds and a soccer field. It would be laughable if it weren’t so potentially tragic. Yet that’s the situation in the Northern California coastal village of Bolinas.
An observer might well ask, ‘How could any decision-making body be that irresponsible?’ What about the kids and adults using the park on a regular basis? What about the clients of the clinic? What about the medical staff and first responders, who are there virtually all the time? Of course it wasn’t planned, exactly. It just grew, like Topsy, as uninformed or misinformed decision makers sucumbed to telecom industry offers of money for their cash-strapped volunteer fire department – all with the best interests of the community in mind.
Now AT&T is pressing to upgrade to even more powerful antennas and today’s Fire Board may decide as early as next month whether to honor a prior Board’s agreement with the community to keep radiation exposures at existing levels, or agree to the telecom giant’s request. The decision is a momentous one with profound public health and safety, economic and political implications. It is similar to challenges being faced by decision-making bodies across the country as the industry and the Obama administration push for a whole new build-out of ‘wireless capacity.’
Clear and Present Danger
Peer-reviewed scientific evidence from around the world clearly shows that chronic exposure to even low levels of microwave radiation has the potential to cause serious biological harm to humans and other living things. In one study, for example, people living within .5 miles of cell antennas reported the following disorders: fatigue, sleep disturbances, headaches, feeling of discomfort, difficulty concentrating, depression, memory loss, visual disruptions, irritability, hearing disruptions, skin problems, cardiovascular disorders, nausea and dizziness.
Doubt is Their Product
Of course, as with the case of pesticides, asbestos, cigarettes, bovine growth hormone, genetically modified seeds, and most recently climate change, corporations with vested interests in the offending technologies hasten to pooh-pooh any findings of harmfulness, no matter how impeccable the science. They hire compliant scientists and fund junk science studies to generate conflicting findings and sow apparent uncertainty. They work through captive corporate-friendly bodies like the National Cancer Society, the World Health Organization (WHO), International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), and the he Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (read I-Triple-E) to isolate and discredit independent scientists whose work endangers their bottom line.
In fact, as David Michaels’ recent book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health documents, a whole new profession has grown up in recent decades called the ‘product defense industry.’ Its sole purpose is to create doubt and confusion by promoting junk science-for-hire and promulgating denialist disinformation about whatever product or technology is in question. That’s the current situation with wireless health impacts. The more evidence of harm emerges, the harder the industry’s denialist spin-doctors work.
Pre-Emptive Zapping of Democratic Choice
The wide range of biological effects of microwave radiation have been known about since at least WWII and the U.S. military is not the only one to develop and deploy microwave weaponry – of both lethal and what are euphemistically termed ‘non-lethal’ varieties. Those in denial about wireless health risks might well ponder ‘If microwaves have no biological effects, how can they be weaponized?’ Until 1996, local jurisdictions were nixing the placement of microwave antennas in populated areas on the basis of potential health risks. That was very inconvenient for a telecom industry salivating at the prospect of huge profits from the planned ‘wireless revolution’ roll-out.
So industry lobbyists and lawyers wrote, the Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 704 of the Act made it illegal for local jurisdictions to prevent placement of microwave antennas on the basis of health risks. That’s right, local electeds are prevented by law from protecting the health and safety of their constituents. Just one more example of the creeping corporate capture of the mechanisms of governance. The Act also stipulates that once one telecom company places a microwave antenna in a given spot, other carriers cannot be denied permission to ‘co-locate’ there, too. The co-location clause means that once one telecom outfit gets in, there goes the neighborhood.
Targeting First Responders with Co-Location
One favorite co-location spot in communities across the continent has been fire departments, the argument being: ‘Hey, you’ve already got all those emergency communication antennas on your tower, what’s the problem with adding a few more?’ But when firefighters started complaining en masse of a whole range of ill effects like sleeplessness, anxiety, mental confusion and cancers, a study was done the results of which led the International Association of Firefighters in both the U.S. and Canada to enact a policy opposing further microwave co-locating on their facilities until exposure to such RF radiation is proven ‘safe.’ Nobody’s holding their breath on that one, because accumulating evidence points ‘like a forest in the wind’ in just the opposite direction. No ‘safe’ level of exposure to man-made radio frequency radiation has ever been established, nor is it ever likely to be. Living cells communicate with each other with extremely nano-tiny electro-magnetic signals. As the growing population of electro-hyper sensitive (EHS) people who have become injured through over-exposure attest, we are all electro-magnetic beings. The current level of ambient electro-magnetic radiation from wirelessness is now millions of times the natural level in which living cells evolved.
A Contract WITH the Community, or a Contract ON the Community?
In 2005, informed citizens and a responsive Fire Board made an agreement to cap the radiation power of the antennas already contracted for at their existing levels. But now, AT&T, acting through its sub-contractor Lyle Corporation, is pushing to upgrade its antennas to accommodate the new G3 and G4 cell phone technologies, making the duplicitous claim that this will not increase the existing exposure levels. Arthur Firstenburg, Westinghouse Scholar and founder of Cellular Phone Task Force – himself an EHS sufferer – reports that exposure levels are 100s of times higher for 3G and 4G bandwidth frequencies and power densities than those used before.
At last Monday’s Fire Board meeting an unidentified young Lyle representative handed out a ‘compliance report’ conducted by another sub-contractor called EBI Consulting, which purported to show no increase in radiation from the proposed upgrade. However the ‘report’ failed to include numbers that allow comparison with existing levels, and it was clear that, under questioning, the young man didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. The Board sent him back to his masters with the request to come up with sets of comparative numbers on which they might base a decision. Trouble is, asking AT&T or its hirelings to give you accurate numbers is like asking BP to tell you how much oil it spilled in the Gulf. [ Article continues below. ]
Who’s Liable to be Liable?
Another issue for would-be denialists to ponder is: What if long-term exposure does turn out to be – as the evidence strongly suggests – a big public health problem. Who’s accountable when the class action law suits start coming in? Who gets sued? Who pays? In a study commissioned by concerned Bolinas citizens in the last round on this issue with the previous Fire Board, consultant Blake Levitt, advised as follows:
“Liability has increasingly been passed down to the municipalities, often without their knowledge. In 1999, Congress passed the E911 Act making 911 the national emergency response number for both wired and wireless phone systems.
“But hidden in that bill was an exemption that the wireless industry fought for behind closed doors, granting them all liability protection for the “operation” of their systems, which includes adverse effects from RF and various other failures/hazards.
“In addition, many insurance companies now refuse to indemnify telecom providers for RF because it is a known environmental pollutant. Lloyds of London no longer underwrites industries for RF.
“Independent tower companies, such as Crown Castle and American Tower Company, which are entities separate from the service providers, typically are set up as Limited Liability Corporations (LLC’s). Such business structures place most of their assets out of reach.
“This means that anyone seeking redress for damages of any kind will only have the municipality to approach the last body to which the Telecom Act gave final authority over all siting decisions.
“It therefore makes sense for a municipality to create the best possible protections for itself and its citizens with strong zoning regulations, and to site RF installations as far away from the population as possible. In the eventuality of a lawsuit, that is the best thing a town could exhibit as good-faith evidence.”
Another Cause for Pause
It also became apparent in Monday’s meeting that the Board lacks some clarity about the permitting process it is involved in with the County Planning Division and the California Coastal Commission. At issue is the implication of the Board’s signing of an application to the Planning Division that would, in effect, make the Board a co-applicant with Lyle for the upgrade. The Lyle rep claimed that the signing was what AT&T liked so that there was a ‘partnership’ with the lessor, but, he said, it was only a pro forma step in a long process and would not foreclose future choice.
However, the county Planning Division’s person in charge of this application, Lorene Jackson, stated in a phone call that the Board isn’t forced to sign the application, but if it does, it is officially requesting the permit in partnership with AT&T. The original 1997 Fire District contract, later bought by AT&T, stipulates (Section Two C) that “consent shall not be withheld unreasonably for any material modification or changes to said plans.” ‘Unreasonable’ by whose metrics?
And if AT&T is permitted more antennas, other carriers will also demand their 4G antennas be co-located on Bolinas’ towers. Already T-Mobile has put in such a request. There would be no way to stop many more highly irradiating antennas if AT&T’s antennas are OK’d.
Drinking the Denialist Cool Aid
Despite a temporary postponement of its deliberations, the Board could still drink the denialist cool aid and give its permission for the requested upgrade. Why? They would not receive any more money for the additional antennas. Would the telecom giants sue tiny Bolinas? Or take their antenna’s and their lease payments elsewhere? The income from the antenna lease is estimated to account for 20% of its yearly budget. The hard-working members of the Board have so far been open to hearing citizen concerns, but it is as yet unclear whether they will come down on the side of the precautionary principle or of dollar-driven denial.
======== For more information: Books:
Disconnect by Devra Davis
Zapped by Louise Gettleman
Doubt Is Their Product by David Michaels
Dirty Electricity by Sam Milham
Websites: WiredChild.org MagdaHavas.com ElectroMagneticHealth.org EMFSafetyNetwork.org BioInitiative.org PowerWatch.org.uk
======== James Heddle is a multi-media advocacy journalist and blogger. He co-directs EON, the Ecological Options Network with Mary Beth Brangan, who contributed to this report. They have been reporting, educating and organizing on this issue for over a decade. They are, respectively, the director and co-producer with Libby Kelly of the award-winning documentary PUBLIC EXPOSURE: DNA, Democracy and the ‘Wireless Revolution,’ broadcast repeatedly on LinkTV and used by community organizers around the world.
===== Please remember, your bite-size contributions on our Donate Page are what help keep us going. You can also send a check made out to EON to EON, POB 1047, Bolinas, CA
“Don’t Be Dumbed Down by ‘Smart’ Hype,” Says MIT Engineer
Electrical engineer and radiation remediation consultant Rob States lays out the multiple risks to privacy, safety, security and human health posed by PG&E’s forced mass installation of wireless so-called ‘smart’ meters at a North Bay Patriots Town Meeting January 5, 2011 in Cotati, CA.
===== Please remember, your bite-size contributions on our Donate Page are what help keep us going. You can also send a check made out to EON to EON, POB 1047, Bolinas, CA
Conservatives and not-so-conservatives join in support of electro-sensitive people whose health and lives are being damaged by exposure to electro-magnetic pollution from PG&E’s wireless ‘smart’ meters to demonstrate and testify at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) meeting February 24, 2011 in San Francisco, CA.
===== Please remember, your bite-size contributions on our Donate Page are what help keep us going. You can also send a check made out to EON to EON, POB 1047, Bolinas, CA
