Portland Neighbors Fight Uphill Battle Against Cell Towers

By Anna Griffin, The Oregonian 

Portland’s next great neighborhood war has barely begun and already been lost.

You wouldn’t know the cause is hopeless from the signs dotting the leafy Northeast neighborhoods of Beaumont-Wilshire and Irvington, the ones defiantly asking, “Where are you when we need you, Amanda Fritz?” and insisting, “No Cell Towers in Residential Areas!”

But facts are facts. There are about 800 wireless antennas within city limits. Experts expect that to double in the next few years, with many going in residential neighborhoods.

Today, Sunnyside and Mount Tabor. Tomorrow, your neck of the woods. And there’s not much you can do.

“The bottom line is that these things make bad neighbors. They’re ugly. They’re noisy. Who knows what they do to your health?” said Colin O’Neill, an organizer of the anti-cell-tower group RespectPDX and a homeowner near a new antenna wireless provider Clearwire is installing in Beaumont-Wilshire.

Portlanders can expect to see signs like this pop up in more neighborhoods.

 

Nobody wants an antenna in their backyard. Everyone wants their cell phone and laptop to work everywhere. Wireless service has evolved from luxury to necessity: More than 60 percent of Portland 9-1-1 calls now come from cell phones. That fact — and, oh, yes, the telecommunications industry’s ability to spend tens of millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress — have prompted the federal government to repeatedly restrict city, county and state leaders’ ability to control where the towers and antennas can go.

Federal regulations bar local governments from blocking antennas over health concerns. Cities can use land-use laws to steer towers into commercial and industrial areas but have scant say over them in the public right-of-way — say, on utility poles outside your house.

A few years ago, Portland leaders decided that they’d rather have more, smaller antennas than a few giant old-fashioned cellular towers. So city regulations encourage smaller antennas above busy streets on existing structures such as church steeples and water towers.

The problem: There aren’t many of those in residential neighborhoods, where more and more of us rely on wireless.

For providers, utility poles are the easiest way to expand. That turns scary when you consider how many poles there are in Portland — 170,000 at last count — how close many sit to porch swings, dinner tables and baby cribs and how little we really know about the long-term health impact of all these wireless devices.

“I don’t want my family to be the test case,” said Steven Cole, who lives across the street from the proposed Irvington antenna. “Nobody does.”

We don’t have a choice. Under city policy, companies must warn neighbors that a new antenna is coming, must meet with them and let them vent. Venting, however, isn’t close to vetoing. By the time providers file the proper paperwork, they’ve spent months figuring out precisely where they need a new antenna. They’re not likely and certainly not required to change because a few homeowners grumble.

Last year City Council members asked Congress to kill the federal rule saying cities can’t use health concerns to block new towers. Earlier this year, they voted to join Arlington, Texas’, petition challenging the Federal Communication Commission’s authority. Those are largely symbolic gestures, not the full-fledged, full-throated legal challenge antenna opponents want.

“Basically, if the carrier says, ‘We want to be here,’ that’s what happens,” O’Neill said. “How is that possible? How can our elected officials possibly think that’s acceptable?”

City regulators say a lawsuit would be a waste of taxpayer money. City commissioners have opted for a more deliberative approach, using contracts with cell phone and wireless carriers who want to do business in Portland to impose some common sense restrictions on, for example, how tall antennas can be. The deals are up for renewal in two years. (Don’t think about how many more antennas are coming between now and then. You’ll just upset yourself.)

“Portland has done everything it can to make this as reasonable as possible under the limitations imposed by the federal government,” said David Soloos, the city’s antenna expert. “We are not allowed to regulate the wireless industry.”

Sadly, he’s probably right. At every step, providers have been ahead of federal regulators. The battle ended before it even started.

Welcome to the future. The cell phone reception is crystal clear, and you can check your email anywhere. Just watch out for the heartburn.

- Anna Griffin

  

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/anna_griffin/index.ssf/2010/06/portland_neighbors_fight_uphil.html

Fairfax Neighborhoods Battle New Cell Towers

By Fredrick Kunkle

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 8, 2010; 11:11 PM 

A group of Fairfax County neighborhoods is battling plans to install mobile telephone antennas in a conflict that a county supervisor says appears to be occurring more often as telecom carriers push further into residential areas to satisfy the demand for smartphone service. 

On the eve of a county Planning Commission meeting Thursday, residents stepped up efforts to oppose two of the five antennas planned in the Providence district near Vienna. 

Elizabeth Slucher, 50, chair of the Lakevale Estates Community Association, said opponents of a 57-foot-tall antenna on Vale Road fear the new tower will mar the aesthetics in a neighborhood that was developed as part of an equestrian community in 1968. Its utilities have been buried underground. She said some opponents also worry that the cluster of mobile phone antennas poses a health threat because of the radio waves they emit. 

John Janka, 48, a telecom lawyer, has organized a Web page, an online petition and a 29-page document explaining opposition to a 58-foot tower that he said is virtually in his front yard on Oak Valley Drive. 

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/08/AR2010120807731.html

The Naked Truth About Scanners

By Roger Simon
December 28, 2010 04:34 AM EST  

 

On the day after Christmas, readers of The Washington Post were given a real treat: pictures of naked men.

The men in the pictures were fully clothed, but they were naked nonetheless, because the pictures came from airport full-body scanners.

The machines provided graphic pictures of the male anatomy. True, they were no more graphic than Michelangelo’s David or Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (that’s the naked guy with his arms and legs stuck out), but both of those were depictions, not actual people trying to heft their wheelie bags on the conveyor belt, take off their shoes and jackets, remove their laptops, take out their baggies full of fluids no more than 3 ounces in size, take the metal out of their pockets and somehow get through security before their planes take off.

According to the Post, by New Year’s Day, there will be 500 such machines in use nationwide and 1,000 by the end of 2011, or roughly one machine for every two security lanes in every airport in the land.

If the machines offend your sense of modesty or decency for yourself or your children, then you can request a pat-down where your naughty bits may be touched by a Transportation Security Administration screener rather than projected on a video screen.

Officials say 98 percent of people go through the machines rather than request a pat-down, which is not surprising: First, who likes to be touched by a stranger? And second, going through the machines is faster, and flying has becomes such a cumbersome and aggravating experience that most people will do anything to get it over with.

(There is a company called Flying Pasties, which claims to have a product that you slip inside your clothing to screen your private parts. “It’s simply not against the law to keep your private parts private,” the company says.)

Some parties are suing the government over the new machines, claiming an unreasonable invasion of privacy, while others claim the machines expose people to too much radiation, which the government denies.

Most people, however, accept it as just another agony associated with flying (along with fees to check baggage and crowded luggage bins).

And, after all, the machines are worth it because they detect explosives.

Except they don’t. As it turns out, the machines don’t detect explosives at all. They detect images on your body that shouldn’t belong on your body.

“It’s not an explosive detector; it’s an anomaly detector,” Clark Ervin, who runs the Homeland Security Program at the Aspen Institute, told the Post. “Someone has to notice that there’s something out of order.”

Which means those security employees who stare at the screens have to be sharp enough and well-trained enough to detect things that are abnormal. (And some experts think that if the explosives are flat and pancake-shaped and taped to your stomach, they could not be detected anyway, because the picture would look too normal.)

The machines cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, and by 2014, the federal government will have spent $234 million to $300 million for them.

Which would be a bargain if they actually did something besides embarrass people. In May, a TSA screener at Miami International Airport who went through a full-body screening as part of his training was arrested for beating a co-worker with a police baton after co-workers made fun of the size of his private parts.

The solution for passengers? Get used to it.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, was interviewed Sunday by CNN’s Candy Crowley, and Napolitano said nothing was going to change “for the foreseeable future.”

“You know, we’re always looking to improve systems and so forth,” Napolitano said. “But the new technology, the pat-downs, is just objectively safer for our traveling public.”

But Crowley decided to screen and pat down that assertion.

Citing an ABC report, Crowley said, “There are some major airports who had a 70 percent failure rate at detecting guns, knives, bombs, that they got through in your tests…. So how good can it be when you have major airports with a 70 percent fail rate?”

Napolitano dismissed those results as old and questionable and said, “Let’s set those aside.” One of the real successes of the machines and procedures, Napolitano said, is that they discourage terrorists from even trying to get on planes.

In other words, the machines keep us safe even if they don’t work at all.

“What we know is that you can’t measure [how] the devices … are deterring [terrorists] from going on a plane,” Napolitano said.

“Just people who just are discouraged, thinking they’d be found out,” said Crowley.

“Exactly,” said Napolitano.

In which case, we do not need machines that cost upward of $130,000 each.

All we need are archways made out of $30 or $40 worth of sheet metal that are labeled: “Official Destructo Machine — If You Are a Terrorist, This Machine Will Not Only Zap You, but Put a Picture of Your Private Parts on YouTube.” 

That ought to do it.

dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=29DB2746-0853-0908-7FA154E7FA4AED7B 

 

WiFi in Schools Proven Dangerous

"Cross Currents" by Dr. Robert O. Becker

Dr. Becker tells of the emergence of electromagnetic medicine, which promises to unlock the secrets of healing, and the growth of electromagnetic pollution, which poses a clear environmental danger. He explains the effectiveness of alternative healing methods that use parts of the body's innate electrical healing systems, and warns that our bodies are being adversely affected by power lines, computers, microwaves and satellite dishes. 

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"Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age" by Dr. George Carlo

George Carlo and Martin Schram are aiming to become information-age Ralph Naders. They ask a question that ought to concern America's 103 million mobile phone users, as well as those who merely come within earshot of these popular devices: Is the wireless future a threat to public health? "Visit any public building, college classroom, courthouse, or commuter train, and look around: You'll see people using not just wireless phones but also wireless laptop computers and miniature palm tops," write Carlo and Schram. "What you won't see are the microwaves that are criss-crossing a confined space where a number of people who are not even using these instruments are bombarded by these waves." It sounds creepy. And Carlo, an epidemiologist who once oversaw a multimillion-dollar research project on health for the cellular industry, believes the news is not good: there may be a link between cell phone use and brain tumors. The research is not conclusive, but Carlo and Schram think it's disturbing enough to warrant government action. Needless to say, the industry that once backed Carlo's work now considers him persona non grata. 

Due largely to Carlo's coauthorship, Cell Phones is unavoidably a one-sided story. Key business figures didn't agree to interviews. In fact, this might have been a better book if it were written by Schram, with Carlo as one of several major characters rather than a collaborator. Then again, it would lack the passionate advocacy that will draw many readers to it. And even the most skeptical may want to take a few of the simple safety precautions the authors recommend in a concluding chapter, such as wearing a headset or earpiece when using a cell phone, in order to keep a distance from the radiation-emitting antennae. One look at the x-ray photos reproduced in the book, which show how radiation easily penetrates skulls, will give even the most impervious observer second thoughts. One thing is probably certain: This book is a harbinger of litigation. If Carlo and Schram are correct about their concerns, the cellular industry--as unbelievable as it sounds--may go the way of Big Tobacco. --John J. Miller

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