ONE MILLION FELONS?
BY BILL MANNING
Firefighting not hazardous enough for you? Consider new legislation on the docket in Congress that would turn firefighters into felons for using their scanners in the line of duty. If passed in current form, you might want to add jail time to your emergency response risk analysis.
Recently, members of the House of Representatives` Telecommunications Subcommittee introduced two bills containing language that would place impossible restrictions and a virtual ban on scanner use in this country. Says one pundit, H.R. 2369, the Wireless Privacy Enhancement Act, sponsored by Representative Billy Tauzin (R-LA), and H.R. 1964, the Communications Privacy and Consumer Empowerment Act, sponsored by Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) would give us “one of the most restrictive monitoring laws in the world.”
Why such heavy-handed government regulation of the airwaves? The bills` sponsors declare that the purest intentions motivate the proposed legislation, but confusion and pure politics predominate.
Frequencies reserved for private cellular telephone communications make up about three percent of the radio spectrum and are within the 800 MHz band. Intercepting communications on these frequencies is illegal under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and they are filtered out of legally manufactured scanners. At the same time, the Communications Act of 1934, in general, allows individuals the freedom to listen to what they pick up on the airwaves so long as they keep that information to themselves and don`t personally benefit from it.
But beyond the contradiction of two competing laws, the cellular telephone industry is in a fix: Its credibility is based in part on assuring customers that its products afford complete privacy. Except for encrypting the phone–an expense for the manufacturer–the claim of substantial privacy cannot be made honestly. Radio waves are not confinable, tangible elements; they bounce all over the place and can be picked up inadvertently even by common household receivers. Preventing radio-wave break-ins is like trying to secure your house: You can install an alarm system and surround the house with rottweilers, but the really determined thief will get in anyway. The answer is not to burn down the house so the thieves won`t come, nor is it to burn down the rest of the neighborhood hoping to liquidate possible thieves in hiding.
However, that`s exactly what the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), the industry lobby group, set about to do, with a little help from its friends. Through campaign contributions it gained access to some well-placed members of the House Telecommunications subcommittee (always follow the money trail) and lit the fire. Members of the scanning community were outraged by testimony at “circus-like” subcommittee hearings characterizing them as “electronic stalkers.”
Beyond the current prohibition on scanning cell phone frequencies, H.R. 2369 and H.R. 1964 would make it illegal to intercept, or manufacture scanners that intercept, radio traffic over all frequencies allocated to what are called commercial mobile radio services (CMRS), for-profit wireless telephone services with public interconnections. CMRS frequencies are scattered across the entire radio spectrum, around and within frequencies allocated to fire, police, emergency, maritime, and business radio. If that weren`t enough, CMRS frequencies are continually changed by the Federal Communications Commission, and a CMRS frequency in North Adams may not be a CMRS frequency in South Adams.
Thus, the proposed legislation places an impossible economic and technical burden on scanner manufacturers to produce everchanging, local-specific units that filter out thousands of CMRS slivers across the radio spectrum. The industry would not be able to manufacture legal scanners and stay in business, and most individual firefighters wouldn`t be able to afford the super-filtered units even if they were available. A vital communications tool would be stripped away from a million firefighters, because there would be no legal scanners to use or purchase. Life safety, not to mention individual freedom, would be compromised by a draconian law whose sole purpose is creating a false sense of security among cellular phones users, to the sole benefit of those who manufacture and sell these phones.
As of this writing, groups are working Capitol Hill to change the language in these bills. Among them is the National Volunteer Fire Council. Sources indicate the bills soon will go to markup for a House vote. Hopefully, the bills` opponents will succeed. If not, you soon may become one of a million firefighters for whom monitoring your own fire department`s radio communications would be a felonious act.
