WASHINGTON-Wireless E911 and privacy bills breezed through the House Commerce Committee
last week, setting the stage for votes on the House floor by month’s end.
The bills, passed by the House
telecommunications subcommittee on Wednesday and by the full committee on Thursday, inject a higher level of
safety and protection against unlawful eavesdropping into wireless communications.
While the House is expected to
approve both measures, the E911 bill faces trouble in the Senate from Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.), ranking minority
member of the Commerce Committee.
Hollings, a recipient of strong campaign finance support from trial lawyers,
last year raised concerns about an E911 provision giving wireless carriers limited liability protection on par with local
wireline carriers. States would have two years from the bill’s enactment to legislate a different standard of
immunity.
Indeed, last week Hollings blasted a bill authored by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John
McCain (R-Ariz.) giving firms limited liability protection against lawsuits associated with year-2000 computer
glitches.
House telecommunications subcommittee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), having watched wireless E911
and privacy bills languish in the 105th Congress, put both bills on a fast track this year so any problems could be ironed
out early in the session.
A big part of that was accomplished when Tauzin, with backing from industry, public safety
and heath-care advocates, decided to strip federal land antenna-siting provisions from the E911 bill.
The thinking
behind the strategy was to avoid potentially fatal opposition from the National League of Cities, the National
Association of Counties and others.
Local officials and citizen activists, despite the old bill’s heavy emphasis on
improving antenna siting on federal grounds, feared they still would lose their voice in circumstances where wireless
carriers applied for tower clearances on federal property adjacent to or within larger tracts of non-federal land.
The
National Park Service did not like the bill’s federal land antenna-siting mandate either, arguing that existing siting law
is hard enough to square with its obligations under environmental laws.
Still, getting antenna-siting language out of
the bill appears to have been a pyrrhic victory for some of the bill’s opponents. States lost the chance to receive
matching federal funds-possibly millions of dollars a year-for upgrades of 911 public safety answering points, or
PSAPs.
The money was to have been generated from fees carriers paid government agencies to erect antennas on
their property.
Activists who decry the explosion of antenna siting because of the aesthetic impact and because of
fears of health risks from low-power mobile phone transmitters also lost out. A portion of the revenue from federal
siting fees-$10 million during five years-would have been earmarked for federal cancer research relative to wireless
technology.
The bill’s designation of 911 as the universal emergency telephone number would be a significant
improvement from the current situation where emergency numbers differ from town to town.
The wireless privacy
bill would extend legal protection-largely limited to analog cellular service-to all analog and digital mobile services. In
addition, the measure cracks down on unlawful interception and disclosure of wireless conversations and on the
improper modification of radio scanners to enable eavesdropping.
