Gadgetory

i'm dan farber and i'm joined here by Donna Tam from cnet who's been covering the cell phone radiation industry and one of the issues that's come up is that the city of San Francisco would like to see some warning signs put on cell phones when they're acquired by customers and quite a bit of controversy around that correct yeah the city passed an ordinance the rights no ordinance in 2010 saying they wanted to educate consumers about specific absorption rates of cell phones which means the amount of radiation that they might be giving off and after after they approved the ordinance the ctia which is the wireless industry's lobbying group filed suit saying that it was it was going against their First Amendment right and forcing them to convey a message that they didn't want to convey they're afraid of the weight that would be placed on them providing this message for consumers which would cause some alarm and panic about cell phones in general that seems this is very similar to what happened with the smoking industry where for years and years the smoking industry would say that well there's no need to have any warning labels on sun because there's no proof well at the end of the a turned out that smoking was harmless harmful to health and I think a lot of people could have lived longer have they been warned earlier there are a lot of parallels are being drawn about that the city is definitely standing by that they're saying you know there's no definitive proof that cell phones cell phone radiation is related to cancer but are do we have to wait till someone dies before we can say let's warn people about that risk and it's not just San Francisco in Washington DC representative dennis kucinich has put a bill in play that it will require some warning labels put on cell phones as well it obviously it's not going to get through this Congress anytime soon but the cell phone industry is really ratcheting up its lobbying and you know trying to keep itself from having to post these kinds of warnings yeah and definitely everyone all the cities and counties across the country or that one do cell phone radiation labeling like this they're watching this case in San Francisco to see what will happen in the courts what happened yesterday so basically the judges heard arguments from both sides both from the wireless industry lobbying group and also from the city of San Francisco and the judges asked pretty tough questions on both sides and at the end when the judges remark that both sides had really good arguments and that they would take into consideration and and we should be expecting some sort of ruling from them soon if they decide to stay this preliminary injunctions which will put a hold on all these materials at San Francisco once produced they may choose to appeal may go all the way up to the Supreme Court or may go back down to the district court where they'll duke it out some more well thanks Donna we'll stay tuned for seen it i'm dan farber thanks for watching