HR 3557 and Related Bills are a Lose-Lose for Everyone Except the Wireless Industry

September 5, 2023 | ZERO5G.com | Image Source – Wired Broadband Inc. | STOP The Digital Prison |

Pro-telecom bills HR 3557, HR 4141 and 50+ related bills are a lose-lose for everyone except for the wireless industry.

Attorney Jullian Gresser stated: “…We must remember that this wireless infrastructure is intended to facilitate invasions of privacy, and government and corporate surveillance,
in violation at a practical level of numerous state laws protecting consumer privacy. It will authorize intrusion and eliminate protection of your own home, in violation of the fourth and ninth amendments. It will enable massive searches, and indeed assaults, of millions of people in their homes, without their owners’ informed consent. It will violate various state constitution environmental rights…”

Attorneys Andrew Campanelli, Scott McCollough, and Jullian Gresser discuss with Moderator Odette Wilkens HR 3557, HR 4141, and other pro-telecom bills as well as practical actions that people can take locally to oppose and counter these insidious bills.

Link To Video HERE

Town Hall Re: Federal Bills Transcript HERE

Brief Summary of Presenter Comments
by Julian Gresser

Andrew Campanelli

The net result of HR 3557 and the collection of over 50+ related bills is to cripple the power of cities, counties, towns, villages, and even states to regulate anything to do with cell tower applications. If passed, states and local communities will have zero power to regulate in any way the placement of wireless facilities on public or private property.

In New York City, if someone files an application to install 12,000 small wireless facilities, how could anyone reasonably expect the permitting authority to make a decision in 90 days? There is no legitimate purpose for adopting something like this. It is just inherently insidious.

Scott McCollough

This bill and its related bills represent almost everything that telecoms could want.

The telecoms wrote it. You can tell just from looking at it. If you’ve looked at enough legislation, this is not something some staffer wrote. This is not something somebody in Congress was assigned to do. The lobbyists wrote this bill and found somebody to sponsor it. So let’s just make that clear, at the outset.

HR 3557 basically eliminates any existing restrictions in land use laws. Many local jurisdictions have laws that say, for example, in residential areas, you can have a commercial facility, which is what a wireless cell tower is. This bill says: amend your zoning law, or you must grant a variance. It will enable taking private property without adequate compensation. It overrides years of land use precedent and practice. It even implicitly overrules state government Sunshine laws, because no local jurisdiction can meet these deadlines, and still do what you have to do under the Open Meetings Act. There are significant Commerce Clause separation of powers questions: first, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, 11th, and 14th Constitutional amendment problems. Yes, Congress has broad powers, but I don’t think Congress can treat us — the public — in this way.

Julian Gresser

The blizzard of 50+ bills now before the U.S. Congress, beginning with HR 3557, taken together, will have the effect of fatally disempowering and stripping away Constitutional rights and prerogatives of local communities to protect and to secure their health, safety, environment, privacy and basic wellbeing. The combined effect will be to cripple local resilience and interdependence, which are critical conditions for states and local communities to meet a host of environmental, cybersecurity, and other challenges.

False Claims and Premises. The 50+ bills are based on a series of false claims and premises that are not rendered truthful by their being widely asserted, disseminated, and asseverated by the wireless telecom industry and members of Congress:

Wireless infrastructure is safe. It is well documented to be unsafe.
Wireless infrastructure is resilient. In fact, it is less resilient than one based on fiber.
Wireless infrastructure is energy efficient. In fact, it is shown to be vastly energy consumptive.
Wireless infrastructure is cybersecure. In fact, wireless is substantially less secure that optical fiber which facilitates identification of the point of attack, and resilient response.
Wireless infrastructure is climate change friendly. In fact, it is the very opposite.
Wireless infrastructure promotes Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) especially in minority communities, when in fact these same communities are too economically challenged and lack legal representation to escape.
Wireless infrastructure will close the Digital Divide, when it caused it in the first place and will expand it.
Wireless is long-lived, whereas the wireless industry and supporting legislators know full well that wireless is short-lived and given to early obsolescence.

HR 3557 and its associated complementary bills represent a tyrannical attempt by the telecom-wireless industry to shift forever the reasonable and historic balance between the federal government, states, and local communities. Many of these bills offend the Constitution; some significantly abridge hard fought civil liberties; others intentionally and cynically promote and disseminate false claims, or are predicated on them. A few, building on the mayhem created by HR 3557, will jeopardize national security, especially by crippling resilience and interdependent emergency response at the state and local levels to cyberattacks.

At the very least members of Congress must conduct comprehensive risk assessment and due diligence on HR 3557 et al. before voting to approve them. It is political malpractice to fail to do so.

Link To Source HERE