wmartin@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Will Martin) (06/23/89)
Two major telecom-related articles in the Wednesday, 21 June, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Page 1: BELL MUST CUT PHONE RATES BY $101 MILLION by Jim Mosley, Post-Dispatch Jefferson City Bureau In a move that will result in savings to many telephone customers in the St. Louis area, the Missouri Public Service Commission has ordered Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. to reduce its annual revenue by about $101 million. The commission's order, made public Tuesday, will cut rates for customers with Touch-Tone dialing and those who make long-distance calls. The commission's 113-page decision will not affect the charges for basic telephone service. The changes will be effective July 1. The PSC's order calls for: * A 30% reduction in rates charged customers with tone dialing. For residential customers, the rate will decrease to $1.45 a month from $2.05. For business customers, the rate will decrease to $3.10 a month from $4.40. * A 20% cut in charges for long-distance calls made within the same area code. The specific amount of savings will depend on the distance of the call. * A cut in residential-service-connection charges of 23%. Under the order, the rate will decrease to $36.50 from $47.40. Service-connection charges for businesses will reduce by 38% -- to $52.25 from $84.25. * Lowering access charges that Bell charges companies that provide long-distance service. That provision should benefit consumers, because long-distance companies pass on their access charges to customers, the commission said. The commission said the cost of long-distance calls between area codes should drop by about 10% if long-distance carriers pass on their savings to customers. * Lowering "mileage" charges that are paid by rural customers. Currently, the charges range from $2.05 a month to $16.55 a month, depending on where a customer lives. Under the commission's order, the charge will be $2.05 for all customers who must pay it. * Reducing rates for Wide Area Telecommunications Service, known as WATS, and 800 service. The amount of those reductions will depend on the type of WATS and 800 service a customer has and where the calls begin and end. A Southwestern Bell official said Tuesday that the company was "deeply disappointed by the size of today's revenue reduction." "While it may make for some big headlines, the order does not provide for changes in the regulatory framework that are required by today's increasingly competitive telecommunications environment," Dan T. Hubbard, a Bell assistant vice president, said in a statement. The decision Tuesday stems from complaints filed last year against the utility by the PSC staff and the state's Office of Public Counsel, which represents consumers in utility-rate cases before the commission. The complaints alleged that in 1987 Bell had earned more than $200 million too much from its Missouri customers. Bell has about 1.6 million customers in Missouri; about 750,000 of those customers live in the St. Louis area. Both complaints had sought cuts in basic local service charges. Bell had opposed any rate reductions; the utility disagreed that it had earned too much in 1987 from its customers in Missouri. [Big surprise! WM :-)] [This thing reads like it is heavily padded. I will summarize some paragraphs here: the PSC said that Bell was doing better than when the last rate case was decided in 1983, and tax law changes would help it too. The basic rates weren't raised because they are still below the national average. The Public Counsel was disappointed because the changes will affect only a minority of customers (those with touchtone and who make LD calls -- see, I TOLD you they were the minority! WM).] The commission also rejected a plan by Bell that would have given the utility the authority to annually raise local rates by an amount needed to keep pace with inflation plus a 3% "productivity factor". [I should hope so! -WM] ***End of article*** And, on page B1 (first page of the editorial section): REACH OUT, TAP SOMEONE Court Overrules Privacy On Cordless Telephones by Tim Bryant Is the privacy of your telephone conversation protected by federal law? Not if you are using a cordless phone. The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the 21-year-old Omnibus Crime Control Act does not prohibit interception of cordless phone conversations. In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge appellate panel said: "Courts have not accepted the assertions of privacy expectation by speakers who were aware that their conversation was being transmitted by cordless telephone." The appeals court ruling, handed down last week in St. Louis, arose from a case in Iowa in which criminal charges were filed against a man who had been unaware that a family four blocks from his house was listening to his conversations over his cordless phone. The man, Scott C. Tyler, filed a civil suit over the matter and said that he would press his case to the Supreme Court, if necessary. "It's been a five-year battle, and this is not over by any means," Tyler said. Tyler, 44, of Dixon, Iowa, spent 123 days in prison on two theft convictions in Iowa. Authorities said Tyler had set up a dummy company to bilk two food distributors out of $35,000 in goods. The case began in 1983 when Richard and Sandy Berodt, who lived four blocks from Tyler and his family, discovered that their cordless phone was picking up conversations from the Tylers' cordless phone. "Based on what they overheard, the Berodts suspected Scott Tyler of criminal activity," the appeals court said in its opinion. The Berodts called the Scott County Sheriff's Department in Davenport, Iowa, and were asked to continue eavesdropping on the Tylers. Although no court order was obtained, the Berodts tape-recorded some of the conversations with equipment that Tyler said the sheriff's department had provided. A jury convicted Tyler of theft, even though the judge refused to allow the recordings as evidence. In July 1985, Tyler and four members of his family filed a damage suit against the Berodts, Scott County, the sheriff and a deputy. US District Judge Harold D. Vietor of Des Moines, Iowa, ruled against the Tylers, saying that federal wiretap laws, the 1968 crime control act and the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures did not apply to cordless phone transmissions. Scott County Prosecuting Attorney Thomas C. Fritzsche said he agreed with Vietor's decision. He added that the appeals court's ruling puts the 8th Circuit "in the mainstream" of recent decisions involving cordless phones. "What gave Mr. Tyler some type of credibility was that there has been a split in the case law that has looked at this type of case," Fritzsche said. "But a whole recent trend of opinions has been away from that type of decision. All the courts -- and there have been three or four of them -- have gone the other way. "Mr. Tyler has ideas that this is a case of burning social issues. It really isn't." Tyler had relied on a case that the 9th US Court of Appeals decided in 1973. In that case, telephone conversations were disallowed as evidence when at least one participant in a phone call used an ordinary phone line. But among the cases that the 8th Circuit cited in its ruling against Tyler was a 1970 case involving former Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa. In that instance, the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals said there was no "expectation of privacy" for conversations over a mobile telephone. In a footnote to its opinion, the appeals court here said that the 1986 overhaul of federal wiretap laws had changed the definition of wire communications to say that "such term does not include the radio portion of a cordless telephone [call] that is transmitted between the cordless telephone handset and the base unit." "As a matter of federal law, we do not believe the Tylers had a justifiable expectation of privacy for their conversations," the court said. Tyler said it was time for the law to catch up with technology. "Everybody is going to be walking around with a pocket phone in the next five to ten years," he said. "The Fourth Amendment needs to be extended." He said his cordless phone had been a Father's Day gift. "Little did I know it would cause five years of hell in my life," he said. Judges George G. Fagg of Des Moines, Gerald W. Heaney of Duluth, Minn., and Frank J. Magill of Fargo, N. D., issued the opinion. ***End of Article*** [Whew! Fingers are tired! WM] [There is also a sidebar item telling what a cordless phone is. I won't bother typing that in; people here know that... :-) It does mention that "modern cordless phones are equipped to use 10 channels ... Each channel has a digital security code that can be programmed 256 different ways. The result is a 2560-to-1 chance that two cordless phones with channels programmed the same way will be within each other's broadcast range..." That calculation of probability sounds a bit specious to me, but I'll leave the rebuttal up to others for now... -WM] One last comment -- I find it surprising that the article does NOT mention the ECPA in any way. Of course, the court case has to be based on law in effect at the time, but the ECPA has changed things since then, and I would have thought that the writer and editor would have wanted to bring that point out... Regards, Will Martin
cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan) (06/27/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0210m01@vector.dallas.tx.us>, wmartin@st-louis-emh2.army.mil (Will Martin) writes: >[There is also a sidebar item telling what a cordless phone is. I won't >bother typing that in; people here know that... :-) It does mention that >"modern cordless phones are equipped to use 10 channels ... Each channel has >a digital security code that can be programmed 256 different ways. The >result is a 2560-to-1 chance that two cordless phones with channels >programmed the same way will be within each other's broadcast range..." >That calculation of probability sounds a bit specious to me, but I'll leave >the rebuttal up to others for now... -WM] Utterly bogus. The "256 different ways" refers only to control signals; the security codes are designed to minimize the chance that the wrong base station will respond to a handset's keystrokes (or that the wrong handset will ring in response to a base's ring transmission). Two systems sharing the same channel and in an overlapping area will collide and allow eaves- dropping; however, if set to different security codes, the bases/handsets will ignore commands from the non-corresponding handset/base. -- John Cowan <cowan@marob.masa.com> or <cowan@magpie.masa.com> UUCP mailers: ...!uunet!hombre!{marob,magpie}!cowan Fidonet (last resort): 1:107/711 Aiya elenion ancalima!