Why didn't Congress, the legislative body that passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TC Act), pay proper attention to the public health aspects of this legislation? The short answer is: Money!

Fortunes have been made in radio and television broadcasting in the USA. In theory and in law, the electromagnetic spectrum in this country belongs to the people, and is supposed to be used to the benefit of the public. In practice, access to the electromagnetic spectrum is controlled by the federal government through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent agency of the federal government that was originally established to manage the electromagnetic spectrum, issuing licenses and assigning frequencies in such a way that one user would not interfere with another user.

Historically, fortunes have been made in radio and television broadcasting in the USA. As the media controls the publicity a person or an issue can receive, it is exceedingly powerful, especially to a member of Congress who must stand for reelection to office periodically.

The underlying philosophy of those who establish policy for the use of the electromagnetic spectrum has always been that spectrum is an asset, hence unused spectrum is the waste of an asset, and therefore undesirable. Because the public health hazards associated with commercial radio broadcasting, the first wide-spread use of the electromagnetic spectrum by the public, were subtle, it was not recognized that any such hazards existed at all. As a result, the idea that the public might benefit if portions of the electromagnetic spectrum were left unused never occurred to anyone in a position of political power.

As the telecommunications industry has grown, with satellites now making possible instantaneous transmission of audio and video around the globe, the demand has gone out repeatedly for "more spectrum." Long ago, sections of the electromagnetic spectrum were set aside for different users: commercial radio broadcasting, amateur radio operators, municipal fire and police departments, various government agencies, commercial television broadcasters, satellite communications, etc. The commercial users quickly filled up their portion of the spectrum, but they wanted still more. It turned out that the government agencies were not using all of the spectrum that was allotted to them. So, a few years ago, the federal government yielded some of its unused spectrum, in order to make it available for commercial use. A lottery was held to allocate this spectrum among applicants, and stiff fees were charged to the lottery winners. Nearly $20 billion went into the United States Treasury from additional spectrum use fees.

But the companies holding license to this new spectrum complained that they were having problems getting their businesses up and running. A law along the lines of the TC Act was needed. The purpose of this Act was to eliminate the obstacles that the new telecommunications companies were experiencing, and to keep costs low by permitting competition (instead of by regulating the telecornmunications companies).

These new firms - wireless communications companies offering cellular phones, mobile radio, personal communications systems and the like - were having two kinds of problems. They needed to blanket an area quickly with strategically located base transmitters, so that their customers could enjoy service throughout the whole area, but they are running into local opposition to the erection of towers carrying these transmitters. Also, they needed to interconnect with existing telephone companies in order to serve their customers, but wanted exclusion from long-distance equal access requirements and from local exchange carrier interconnection obligations.

So they lobbied Congress to legislate these problems out of existence. Congress obliged by passing the TC Act.

It contains a "preemption clause" that deprives state and local governments of the right to impose any regulation intended to protect the public health that is more stringent than the regulations of the federal government. (This preemption clause may well be unconstitutional: a violation of the Tenth Amendment. To challenge it in court, a lawsuit must be filed. This won't happen until people demand it. Any state could file such a suit.) The TC Act gave the responsibility for the radio frequency health and safety issue to the FCC, an agency which admittedly has no experience at all with public health matters. And, it required other telephone companies to interconnect with the new firms offering phone service from portable telephones such as cellular phones.

Congress itself, when the TC Act came to the floor for a vote, was railroaded. Usually, the members of Congress are given some time to read a bill and consider it, before voting on it. But that was not true for the TC Act. in both the House and the Senate, there was about an hour and a half of debate on it, and then the vote was taken. Not a single member of Congress had had an opportunity to read the bill that was being voted on. (Congressional Record, February 1, 1996, pages S686-S721 and Hi 145-Hi 179.)

Separate bills had been introduced in the Senate and the House of Representatives. As is usual in such situations, the versions that were finally passed went to a joint Senate-House conference committee, which worked to meld the two separate bills into a single one that - hopefully - would be acceptable to both houses of Congress. It was this bill from the conference committee that was presented for a final vote. (The conference committee report is in the Congressional Record of January 31, 1996, pages H1078-H1136.)

The debate on the conference bill was pure rhetoric. A few people protested the fast pace of action, and pleaded for time to read what they were being asked to vote on, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. When the vote was taken, it passed by an overwhelming majority and was signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996.

It was only in the subcommittee, years earlier, that questions of health and safety were addressed. A Congressional committee enjoys broad authority to call people to testify before it Unlike the executive branch of government, which permits members of the public to come forward and testify, Congress invites testimony. in other words, Congressional committees and subcommittees pick and choose who will testify at their hearings. There is no provision for a member of the public who wants to testify before a Congressional committee to do so.

In February, 1993, there was a lot of media publicity about a possible brain cancer hazard associated with the use of cellular telephones. The appropriate Congressional subcommittees responded by holding hearings. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) was chairman of the House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance; he held a hearing that lasted for several days. I attended it the day that Thomas Wheeler, President of the Cellular Telecommunications industry Association (CTIA), was scheduled to testify. At one point Mr. Markey asked him about the safety of cellular telephones. Mr. Wheeler replied that a review of the scientific literature had shown no evidence of any hazard to health.

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My jaw dropped when I heard that, because I knew for a fact that this statement was false. Just six months earlier I had attended a Senate subcommittee hearing chaired by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT) on the problem of law enforcement officers and traffic radar guns that seemed to have given them cancer. These traffic radar guns emit a continuous microwave beam, and some officers had rested them against their bodies when they were not being used to measure the speed of a vehicle. Those who habitually rested them against the same part of the body for years had finally developed cancer at that site.

I thought this sufficiently alarming that I decided to review the scientific literature on this topic. I spent the next six months doing this. So, at the time of Mr. Markey's hearing, I was very well aware of what was in the scientific literature on this subject. While there were not an extensive body of studies of cellular telephones themselves -they were too new - the evidence that was present m scientific literature suggested there was good reason to anticipate a hazard to the brains of cellular telephone users. There were many reports of disturbances to the human nervous systems from electromagnetic fields at the frequencies employed by wireless communications systems; that is, at microwave frequencies. And there were other reports of serious diseases occurring near fixed -transmitters, such as satellite uplinks, and in the vicinity of airports, where a radar beam sweeps the ~ area.

Why Mr. Wheeler would lie in his testimony before the Chairman of a House Subcommittee mystified me. Eventually, he would be found out' and it wouldn't do his future reputation much good. In fact, I was angry enough that I wrote Mr. Wheeler a letter afterward, telling him that I knew he had lied when he testified on that point. of course, he never bothered to reply to me.

It did occur to me that perhaps the person who reviewed the scientific literature for the CTIA had not been very thorough, or had been incompetent, or perhaps biased. There are many ways to do a job badly, and only a few ways to do it well. If a bad job had been done for the CTIA, probably no one there would have been inclined to take a close look at the quality of the work. So Mr. Wheeler might not have known that he was lying. But his failure to reply to my letter suggests that the safety of hand-held radio telephones had a very low priority in the eyes of the industry at that time.

What I felt like doing, when I heard Mr. Wheeler's lie to Mr. Markey, was to stand up and shout, "Mr. Chairman, he was just told You a bold-faced lie. I've just finished a six month review of the scientific literature on the health effects of radio-frequency radiation, and I assure you there is an abundance of evidence of adverse health effects, including cancers, and there is also evidence that the human nervous system is especially vulnerable at these frequencies." But I knew that I would simply get escorted out of the hearing room if I made a commotion like that, so I behaved with proper decorum: I kept silent. I did think about contacting Mr. Markey's subcommittee afterward, but I knew that everything had been carefully scheduled for the hearing, and I was aware that testimony from the public is not normally taken, and I did not have a written report prepared, so I decided that any effort I made to counter Mr. Wheeler's testimony would probably come to nothing. I wrote to Mr. Wheeler, instead.

To sum it up, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is a bill for industry, for profits and for the ideology of deregulation. Congress has taken the word of industry for everything. Oh, Mr. Markey did subsequently call people from the National Institute for Health to testify before him, but they had no answers for him, because they had not studied this issue. So there was no one to counter what the industry said.

The stated purpose of the TC Act is "to provide for a pro-competitive, deregulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced telecommunications and information technologies and services to all Americans by opening all telecommunications markets to competition." Its actual accomplishment seems to be the spread of ill health to those who live in the area served.

There are a few people in Congress who didn't allow themselves to be bamboozled by this bill when the time came to vote. They are listed in the accompanying Table. if anyone can turn this situation around, and protect the American people from the carcinogenic future the TC Act is delivering, it will probably be one of them.

This article by Dr. Lundquist originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 1996 edition of Network News. Reprinted with permission.

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