Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 16:40:48 -0700
From: Glenn Fleishman <glenn@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: School district sued over WLAN radiation
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Dave, I thought your readers would be interested in a lawsuit filed in
Illinois by parents against a school district that has deployed wireless
LANs (WLANs) extensively. The parents believe there is a preponderence of
directly relevant scientific evidence that shows a direct connection
between a large array of illnesses and conditions and the use of wireless
systems of all kinds.
I've posted the lawsuit filing provided to me as a PDF at this link:
<http://wifinetnews.com/archives/002303.html>
Your readers can already find a variety of comments on both sides posted
by people interested in the subject. I'm only aware of a few cell phones
studies, and various US governmental bodies have set exposure guidelines
for microwave radiation that I believe are quite conservative.
What I think is at work here, among other factors, is that there's a
tendency of folks to believe that scientific studies are scientific
studies. The filing I received doesn't include the citation mentioned in
the filing so I can't check out the dozens of reports they reference. I
assume that they're mostly or entirely not peer-reviewed.
There's also the physics problem: signal intensity varies with the inverse
square of the distance from a transmitter, with lots of other detail
thrown in there. The folks who filed this suit are writing as if the Wi-Fi
transceivers were implanted in their children's eyeballs, not a few inches
or feet or yards or hundreds of feet away.
I expect this lawsuit will spawn others.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Fleishman, Unsolicited Pundit: read my work at http://glennf.com
check out my new book, The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, a guide to
Wi-Fi at home, office, and roaming : <http://wireless-starter-kit.com>
freelance reporter for The New York Times, Macworld, InfoWorld, et al.
read all the wireless networking news at <http://wi-fi.weblogger.com/>
Macintosh columnist, The Seattle Times http://seattletimes.com/ptech/