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What does it mean to accept a Wireless Smart Meter on your home or business? by Ronald M. Powell, Ph.D.
For Your Property Rights
• It means that you accept the right of your electric power company to mount, on or inside your home or your business, a meter that acts much like a compact cell tower, without informing you in advance of its full capabilities and associated risks, without your prior approval, and without compensating you for using your property for purposes well beyond metering your electricity. A wireless smart meter measures the electrical energy consumed by your home or business with very fine time resolution, determined by your electric power company, and broadcasts your data over the air using a radiofrequency/microwave transmitter/receiver. The wireless smart meters in your neighborhood form a wireless mesh network. Each meter not only transmits its own data, but also receives and retransmits (relays) the data of other meters, much like cell towers do. The purpose is to assure that all data reach a community-based transmitter/receiver, called a Collection Point, which then relays the data back to the electric power company. According to a document ordered by a California court, each wireless smart meter broadcasts an average of 10,000 bursts of radiation per day, up to a maximum of 190,000 bursts of radiation per day. Together, the wireless smart meters in a community blankets that community with millions to billions of bursts of radiation every day, leaving no location unexposed. Each wireless smart meter also contains a second radiofrequency/microwave transmitter/receiver. It forms a Home Area Network (HAN) with your wireless smart appliances (just now emerging) so that their identity and your use of them can be monitored by the company. • It means that you accept that other utilities may claim a similar right, based on equal treatment with the electric utilities, to use your home or business to mount their wireless equipment under the same terms, that is, without informing you fully of the implications, etc. Those utilities include the gas, water, telephone, and internet service companies. In sum, you accept the fact that your home is no longer your castle, but instead is now the castle of your utility companies. For Your Costs
• It means that the benefits that you are currently receiving, or expect to receive, from the wireless smart meter system are so obvious and so great that you agree to pay for the cost of the wireless smart meter system without even knowing what that cost is. And you may never know what that cost is because there is no requirement in place that the cost be revealed to you. Rather, that cost may be buried obscurely in other charges on your bill. • It means that you have such trust in the integrity and the technical capability of your electric power company that you are willing to forfeit your ability to verify the accuracy of your monthly bill. Instead of insisting on the traditional analog mechanical meter, which cannot be interfered with by anyone, you agree to accept a wireless smart meter that can be reprogrammed remotely and invisibly by wireless signals sent by your electric power company, without informing you and with unknown consequences for your monthly bill.
For Your Health
• It means that you accept the assurances of your electric power company that the wireless smart meter system is safe for your health. That is, you trust your power company to know more about your health than your doctor, and more about the impact of radiofrequency/microwave radiation on your health than the entire international biomedical research community. That community has published thousands of journal articles on this subject and has been sounding the alarm. • It means that you agree to volunteer yourself and your family for an uncontrolled medical experiment, mandated by the Maryland State Government through the Maryland Public Service Commission, to demonstrate what is already known to the international biomedical research community, that radiofrequency/microwave radiation is harmful to human health.
• In sum, it means that the benefits to you from your wireless smart meter are so obvious and so great that they are more important to you than your own health, the health of your spouse, the health of your children, and the health of your friends, your colleagues, and your community. For Your Privacy
• It means that you freely relinquish your right to privacy, because you believe the claims of your electric power company, that it must have, not just the one reading per month required to bill you for electricity, but rather as much information as it can gather, every day:
○ about the activities in your home or your business, as revealed by your detailed patterns of electricity consumption, such as when you get up, when you go to bed, when your children get home from school, and when you are away from your home or business
○ about the identity of every wireless smart appliance in your home or business, and what use you make of all of them. As noted above, each wireless smart meter contains a second radiofrequency/microwave transmitter/receiver that forms a Home Area Network (HAN) with your wireless smart appliances (just now emerging). You have no control over either of the two transmitters/receivers in a wireless smart meter.
• In sum, you accept that your electric power company has the right to install a surveillance device of unprecedented nature on, or inside, your home or business and to use that device for any purposes that it wishes, without making those purposes known to you or gaining your approval. For Your Cyber Security
• It means that you accept that the electrical power to your home or business can be interrupted, intentionally or accidentally, using a new capability – the inclusion in each wireless smart meter of a shut-down switch. That switch can be triggered wirelessly and remotely, either by your electric power company or by successful hackers, to turn off your electrical power, without anyone having to appear on your property, and for any reason, including disciplining you over a billing dispute.
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