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Sensitive and Inside Big Technology: Views from the Other Side (Part Two)
Part two of a series. Click for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.
‘William Boyd’ has worked in tech media for twenty years, even stretching back to the very beginnings of the current wireless age. He’s a few years shy of the usual retirement age, employed at a well-known Silicon Valley corporation, and very clear that he cannot be known to support Stop Smart Meters!—or anyone else questioning the health and safety of the wireless hegemony.
His career could be damaged by talking openly about what he calls the “conspiracy of silence” around the unacknowledged harm in wireless technologies. He also finds himself sensitive to wireless transmissions, and unable to openly discuss that with his co-workers or peers.
“In the late 1990s, when some of the first data-transmission technologies were being developed, I had a conversation with an RF engineer. He told me, off the record, that he and other engineers were very concerned about at least one of the technologies being used in cell phone transmission—there were insane amounts of radio-frequency power coming out right next to people’s heads. That’s how long people in this field have known there is something wrong, and have not been able to say a word.”
“I’m very wary of this technology. A few years ago I hadn’t really thought about wireless having harmful effects. But then this is what happened to me. I bought a wireless/wired router for my home network. I assumed you had to turn the WiFi option on. I didn’t know it was on by default when using just the wired option. It sat less than five feet from my desk. After a week I realized I was feeling really bad. I started to think about it. I went through a kind of tech-support type of trouble-shooting, like I do for other things. ‘What’s different this week?’ So I put the old [wired] router back. Within two days I felt better.”
“That WiFi router left me with low energy and headaches, and I felt like my brain wasn’t all there. I have to use my brain to work! My home-office is about two feet from my electric meter, on the other side of the wall. I am very sure I don’t want a ‘smart’ meter there. I’m a cancer survivor. There’s no way I’m going to have a ‘smart’ meter on my house.”
“I work at home and live out a ways in the country. When I leave home and go back to civilization, I don’t feel well. I feel disoriented. It’s like going back into smog—like Southern California, when I used to live down there.”
“I think about things analytically. We have inserted all these new variables into the environment, without these things being tested. Why is it assumed that they are safe? There is a conspiracy of silence, and there has been for twenty years. Who knows how much bigger it is now.” William himself has tried to have information published, but suffered backlash for it (to say more than this would disclose identifying details).
“The truth is people who work in tech live in a totally different world. Engineers are oriented to their own self-enclosed universe, where people are responsible citizens and everything is logical. They just don’t get the part about psychopathic bosses and ruthless profits.”
“Engineers can be trained in, say, mechanical engineering, and still think they are smarter than you in, say, networking. You folks fighting ‘smart’ meters have to be able to show tech types that you understand the technical aspects of ‘smart’ meters—or they will immediately dismiss what you are trying to do by calling you tin-foil-hat types.” Green Tech Media, for instance, which serves the sort of engineer William is talking about, puts health concerns about ‘smart’ meters in the same category as crop circles and alien abductions.
William has another warning for us. “The cell phone industry wants to get in on the ‘smart’ meter deal, and into the smart grid.” Qualcomm recently argued for using the cellular network for ‘smart’ metering. He knows something of Qualcomm’s technology—and even more about the company’s ruthlessness. “They weren’t involved before. If Qualcomm says they’re going to do something, it gets done. Watch out for what they are up to.”
If the cellular industry enters the picture, there may be even less consideration for the pervasive health effects from ‘smart’ meters, as they may be able to invoke the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which legally prevents any consideration or even discussion of health effects when deciding where to place cellular communications facilities.
Perhaps every house with a ‘smart’ meter in this nation could become considered a “telecommunications facility,” and thereby every citizen will lose the power to protect themselves, their family, or their neighborhood from 24/7 radio-frequency emissions. William suggests we keep our eye on this emerging aspect of the ‘smart’ grid. Here’s another article about Qualcomm’s “SmartSynch” program.
“If you read the technical media, these people working on the ‘smart’ grid are totally upfront about what they want to do, about the scope of their ambition. And so far, it seems like few people are noticing. Real investigative reporting is missing from this picture. You don’t even have to have a complete understanding of the technology to report on it. The level of apathy today is frightening.”
“For myself, I have a meaningful connection to the natural world and the cosmos, living out here in the forest. When I see people glued to their wireless gadgets I have this feeling that many of them don’t have that have level of meaning in their lives. It’s like those gadgets have taken the place of real connections.”
Working at home, William can manage his sensitivities and keep employed. We hope we can address some of his suggestions, and bridge the gap between those who’ve been harmed by tech, and those who are working inside it.
Postscript: here is a ready-to-go primer on the issue of health effects from ‘smart’ meters, a tip-sheet for journalists. Any takers in big media?
Posted in Dirty Electricity, Electro-Hyper-Sensitivity, FCC, Uncategorized
6 Comments
Don’t Like Being Fried by RF? Write Gina at the EPA
Many of us have wondered which branch of the US government should be concerned with the radio-frequency radiation we are being exposed to. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set the (very high) limits, but they have no biologists, doctors, or environmentalists on staff. Why are they given authority to say what is safe for humans, animals, and the environment?
What about the electro-smog that permeates our environment? Could perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be called to account for, and regulate, the levels of ambient radio-frequency microwaves we are exposed to? The last time they made any assessment was 1979! This possibility was recently put forth at a conference in Vermont (video below), where Gina McCarthy of the EPA invited US citizens to write her agency to ask for assessment of current RF exposures.
“I do the radiation part of EPA. Feel free to aggravate me as much as you want,” she says. We think everyone concerned about RF should take Gina up on her offer. Please take a moment to write her at the EPA (address follows).
Other regulatory possibilities have been suggested as well. At the recent Wireless Safety Summit in Washington DC, participants called for the Surgeon General to issue warnings about cell phone use. That seems a good idea, modeled on cigarette smoking warnings of decades past, though that wouldn’t cover the way in which people are being exposed to RF in the environment.
However, it would seem that few of us trust government anymore. A recent NYT poll put the number at a mere 10%. Little wonder, when we watch our PUC officials bow down to almost every utility request or desire, and whatever regulatory hurdles they do put up take months to enact, while the utilities move on, heedless.
Write a request to the EPA to do its job and protect us from wireless radiation being emitted by ‘smart’ meters and other sources:
Ms Gina McCarthy
Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation
Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington DC 20460
Posted in Environmental Concerns, EPA, FCC, Federal Government, Uncategorized
Comments Off on Don’t Like Being Fried by RF? Write Gina at the EPA
Electro-sensitivity Traced to Evolutionary Ancestors
Biologists know that many animals have acute sensitivities to electrical fields, and that this sensitivity often provides critical information about the world for these organisms. Now research has identified a mechanism. A new study states: “Electroreception is an ancient subdivision of the lateral line sensory system, found in all major vertebrate groups.” That includes humans!
Here’s a summary of the evolutionary route by which this sense made its way from early fish to land vertebrates. Louis Slesin of Microwave News proposes: “A possible implication is that some of us, like sharks and rays, may be able to detect very weak electric fields and perhaps a subset has an electroreceptive system that has gone awry.” (Short Takes on right.)
The New York Times published an opinion piece (too controversial for regular news?) which blithely says: “If we had the electrical sensitivity of that ancient aquatic ancestor or the paddlefish, we would find the world we live in now, which roars with electrical current, deeply inhospitable.”
Well, “deeply inhospitable” just about perfectly describes the experience of many electrically sensitive people. “Smart” meter installations have meant that sensitive individuals who have managed this issue by at least having a home and a neighborhood that was safe, now have nowhere to turn, no safe refuge.
The time has come to start to reckon with such sensitivity and the way the heedless ever-increasing saturation of our environment with electrical fields of various sorts affects those people who can feel it now–and those people who don’t feel it consciously, yet.
Sensitive and Inside Big Technology: Views from the Other Side (Part One)
This is part one of series based on interviews with people inside the high-tech industry who’ve become electro-sensitive and begun to question the silence that pervades their field on the matter. To protect their future ability to find work, we’ve used pseudonyms. Click for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.
Located in the Pacific Northwest, ‘Nora Wood’ has worked in high tech for many years, but now finds herself reckoning with the effect her work environment is having on her health and well-being. She sees a lot of good in technology when it’s wisely used. She’s in her mid-forties and has a sharp mind.
It was a six-month period of working at home, between stints doing high-tech office-based work, that brought the problem to the fore. She felt better at home, but then when she started up her current temporary contract with a major tech company, the troubles returned: hair-trigger irritability, sleep problems, and brain-fog. In the office job before the stretch at home, she’d noticed the wifi routers directly over her workspace, but hadn’t put the pieces together.
“I remember thinking, even early on, that it can’t be good to have cell phone repeaters bouncing the signal around inside a shielded office building.” Now she was determined to find out what was causing her problems. She read up online, and got an RF meter, which confirmed that indeed there were high levels around her workspace. One time her Cornet meter topped out with a spike 100 microwatts per square centimeter (µW/cm2), with base levels of 1 to 3 µW/cm2. (Compare to the Bioinitiative Report recommendation of 0.1 µW/cm2 maximum human exposure.) In addition, she became aware of how a nearby cell tower was part of her home environment. She’s done some rearranging and shielding at home, but at work there’s less she can do, working in an open room with others. She has a grounding pad under her desk, which has helped her feel better at work.
Has she broached the subject with coworkers or management? “They’ve seen me using my grounding pad, but I don’t think they want to hear there is anything wrong with their work environment.” She’s tried to explain the way the pad worked in terms of free-radicals and positively charged electrons, “but they still think it’s tin-foil-hat weirdness.”
“They were interested in the RF meter, until I told them the levels I was getting, and they were like, ‘Yeah, but there’s no evidence, no research that’s a problem.’ People in tech are defensive about radio-frequency, because any question about it is going to disrupt their whole world view.”
“If I go full time, I might be able to get my work area configured for some shielding. I don’t think I can work for a huge corporation like Google or Amazon, where I’d have to work on-site every day, all day. But those are the jobs that pay.”
The industry will be squeezing out the older worker faster, as the environment gets saturated with RF, and the denial gets thicker, and more people become ill. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. My brain isn’t working as well. I feel like I’m doing lesser quality work, and that people perceive me as less smart.” High-tech work is and will be disabling its workers, while the industry refuses to admit the fact.
What will she do in a few months when her contract ends, and she needs another job? She’ll definitely be considering RF exposure when choosing where to work. “I’ll be looking at the set-up, and comparing it to what I already know. I can get creative with questions during the interview, to find out about the wireless coverage in the building without letting them know I’m trying to assess potential exposure. I could also have my meter on inside my handbag, and see what the spikes are, without bringing it out.”
‘Nora’ believes tech has a lot of potential to help people and promote social good, and she cites the example of farmers in Africa texting to get market prices, giving them real bargaining power, rather than relying on the word of deceiving middlemen. “It’s just a shame that there is this horrific other side to it. I’m really conflicted.”
So could technology itself help people address or mitigate exposures? One company, Tawkon (see also this article), has created an app that calculates and displays the likely radiation exposure for the user at any given time, along with a load related features (of course). Apple recently blocked this app for iPhone, though. ‘Nora’ believes open-source Google Android has a better chance of being the venue for radiation-related apps, because there is complete freedom for individual programmers to introduce ideas that could never fly in a top-down corporation like Apple.
“Sharing information is crucial. If you can get a certain number of engineers engaged and understanding the issue, they can create ways to make the technology less detrimental. Like, make it so when your phone rang, it would turn all the other unnecessary stuff off, all the synching, GPS—while it’s near your head.” Once she gets going, there’s a flow of ideas. “You could use the accelerometer inside the phone to sense speed, and shut off automatic connections when you are moving over a certain speed, like in a car,”—that’s when radiation levels from the phone go up. There could be great scope for creativity—once the industry silence has cracked open.
For ‘Nora’ this is a wide-open field full of interesting problems to be solved. She’s a software engineer at heart, and the only difference between her and her co-workers, is that she knows firsthand that this is a problem to work on. But unfortunately, even a load of engineers working wisely to mitigate personal exposure from phones will not address the issue of the ambient, whole-body, 24/7 radio-frequency most of us are exposed to. Indeed, it was the work environment, not personal phone use, that made ‘Nora’ ill.
We hope she can stay in the game long enough to use her brains and her experience to help educate others and eliminate some of the frivolous exposure that people get, simply because nearly the whole industry is in deep and total denial.
It’s clear that if ‘smart’ meter engineers had also been addressing the problem of reducing human exposure to RF, they could have designed a very different device, one that accounted for human health and well-being, not merely corporate convenience and profit.