What happens when a cell tower goes up outside your bedroom window, makes you sick, and the law says you have no right to do anything about it?
In this episode of The Healthier Tech Podcast, R Blank sits down with health and environmental advocate Camilla Rees and attorney Scott McCollough to unpack one sentence buried in the 1996 Telecom Act that took away your town's power to stop a cell tower on health grounds. Thirty years later, courts have stretched that same sentence into a liability shield, so when the infrastructure outside your home makes you sick, the traditional remedies you would have against any other polluter simply do not exist. And right now, for the first time in decades, two federal agencies are finally asking the public what wireless exposure is doing to their health.
Here's what you'll learn:
- How Section 704 of the Telecom Act strips your local zoning board of the power to reject a tower on health or environmental grounds, and why that one clause explains the last thirty years of wireless buildout
- Why courts ruled that trespass, nuisance, and personal injury claims are all preempted by federal law, leaving people who get sick from a nearby tower with no remedy at any level of government
- How the FCC's exposure limits measure only heating, while the FDA approves medical devices every day that use radio frequency radiation specifically because it changes biology
- What the W90 radiation sickness diagnostic code reveals about the gap between what federal health agencies will reimburse and what federal communications regulators will admit exists
- Why the US sits at 23 percent fiber to the home while South Korea sits at 96 percent, and how that gap keeps the country locked into wireless by design
Scott McCollough has spent more than forty years litigating telecommunications and utility law, and serves as Chief Litigation Counsel for Children's Health Defense's Electromagnetic Radiation and Wireless program. In 2021 he and Environmental Health Trust won a DC Circuit ruling that the FCC's decision to leave its radiation guidelines untouched was irrational. The FCC then sat on that order for five years. In this conversation he lays out the next case, filing within a month, built around people who tried to stop a tower, failed, got sick, and were told nothing could be done. Camilla Rees has worked on the biological effects of EMFs for nearly twenty years, co-authored "The Safety of Wireless Technologies: The Scientific View" with Richard Lear, founded Manhattan Neighbors for Safer Telecommunications and ElectromagneticHealth.org, and now serves as Senior Policy Advisor at NISLAPP. She also speaks from personal experience, having moved twice at significant expense to get away from exposures that affected her health.
If you have ever watched a tower go up near your home and wondered why nobody at city hall could stop it, this conversation will change how you think about who actually controls the air around your property.
Connect with Camilla Rees:
Website: https://ElectromagneticHealth.org
Campaign: https://704NoMore.org
Connect with Scott McCollough, Esq.:
Website: https://childrenshealthdefense.org
Campaign: https://704NoMore.org
Take Action:
704 No More is funded entirely by donations. Small donations can be made directly at https://704NoMore.org. Larger donors and family foundations can contact Camilla Rees through the site.
Connect with R Blank:
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