The city by the bay acts to correct some serious excess on two matters of great interest to the wireless community
I’ve covered two bizarre actions taken by the City of San Francisco that have major impacts on both cellular service and the role of government overall. The first of these is an ordinance that requires the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) of cell phone handsets to be displayed at the point of sale, and also requires “educational” materials regarding this complex subject to be distributed to consumers. The second involves the service cutoff recently put into place by the BART system in response to some warped sense of mission WRT public safety on the part of that agency. While it appears that rationality is slow setting in, I’m from San Francisco so I completely understand the City’s political climate and their desire to do the right thing. But, as I’ve said before, government at any level needs to stick with what it is supposed to do and not act outside of local or especially Constitutional bounds. I’m pleased that things in both cases seem to be on the path to correction – slowly, yes, but we’ll take it.
WRT the silly radiation law, it’s looking severely wounded at best. The well-intentioned but clueless bozos who passed this won’t give up immediately, but we can all rest easy now that they’ll before to turn their attention to items in their mandated charter – or at least items other than this. Government should deal in fact, not speculation, and SAR is completely useless, IMHO, in estimating any potential deleterious effects, if any, from the use of a cell phone. And, yes, research continues, as it should, and we might have a definitive statement on this subject eventually, but I’m not counting on it. At any rate, we shouldn’t have completely uneducated local politicians passing laws that make no sense no matter what their good intentions might be.
WRT the BART case, it looks like that agency will now only shut down cellular service when there’s an “imminent” risk, which, if they really get their act together, will mean never. I’m pretty sure that the FCC will eventually issue a statement expressing its displeasure with this cavalier treatment of the airwaves, and, especially critical here, that the BART Board will realize that public safety cuts both ways. I still see a ca-ching in the future of a number of lawyers here, but I consider this progress nonetheless.
We’ve not heard the last, certainly, on either of these issues, and that’s fine. But at least the debate is moving in the direction of rationality, and perhaps government will learn a powerful lesson here about its proper role.
