The House Commerce Committee on Thursday passed a bill that would make it illegal to intentionally intercept private cellular, digital, or PCS communications.
Bill HR 514, otherwise known as the Wireless Privacy Enhancement Act, was passed unanimously by voice vote and sponsored by Representative Heather Wilson (D-New Mexico) also prohibits the manufacture of scanners to intercept wireless calls, and it directs the Federal Communications Commission to regulate certain scanning receivers that may be modified to intercept transmissions.
This aspect of the bill has some scanner hobbyists, who like to monitor the movements of law enforcement and public-safety officials, up in arms.
At a popular scanner Web site, there was a lively protest over the bill. One visitor, who identified himself as Larry Van Horn, said, "The telcom person on Wilson's staff admitted to me this morning that it is their intent to deny the media and civilians access to digital police/fire trunking [sic] systems via scanners because in his words, 'The media listening to police comms have interfered with law enforcement and gotten people killed.'"
Luke Rose, a legislative aide who has had conversations with Van Horn, said Van Horn misinterpreted the legislation, that the language of the bill makes specific provisions to allow public scanning of police band and emergency-service radio transmissions to continue unhindered.
"The legislation restricts regulation to private communication only, and the FCC has agreed to not regulate the scanning of transmissions that fall into the category of law-enforcement bands and emergency-service transmissions," Rose said.
The bill is scheduled for a full House vote in March. Meanwhile, privacy experts support the measure, but feel that it obfuscates a bigger privacy issue.
"This is just a pimple on the elephant," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC. "The elephant is about whether the FBI should be allowed to mandate a technical standard in telephone technology that would facilitate their ability to wiretap. The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, passed in 1994, does just that.
"It's nice to be concerned about citizen's privacy on cellular, digital, and analog phone use," he added. "But it's a drop in the bucket compared to this kind of privacy violation."
