Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) knew for years that certain popular smartphones exceeded the agency’s safety limits for human exposure to wireless radiation when held close to the body, according to data obtained by the Environmental Health Trust (EHT) via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Rather than going public with the testing results, the FCC hid them — even when important lawsuits concerning cellphone radiation’s impact on people’s health were underway.

The outcome of such lawsuits might have been different, had the agency been honest about what it knew, said W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless cases. McCollough called the FCC’s actions “scandalous.”

Miriam Eckenfels-Garcia, director of CHD’s EMR program, told The Defender:

“While we are not surprised that the FCC is hiding information and prioritizing the protection of big industry over people’s health, seeing the FCC’s actions play out in this way reminds us why the work we are doing in this program is hugely important and why CHD is proud to be on the forefront of holding the FCC and telecom industry accountable through our litigation, education and advocacy.”

Eckenfels-Garcia and McCollough commended the nonprofit scientific research and education group EHT for getting the information out to the public.