I didn't bother to read the article, but from the comments it appears that there is a fear that the Feds are trying to get the power to shut down all communications if they felt the need.

Well, guess what? They have had that power for at least six years. There are those who need that power in the case of a national emergency in order to deal with the emergency, and my old Boss was one of the people who was given that power.

One day my group at BIG OIL got called in and told that we would never need to worry about communications with the field since we could now shut down all the cell phone towers to all civilian calls. This would leave them clear for our use during a national emergency.

We thought we already had our communications covered with not only land-line phones but our own hardwire phones to each station and with the radio network we owned and the Telegraph system we still had, but we thought it was nice that others were thinking about us.

I, nor none of our group members, were given access to this power which is good because there is no telling what we might have done with it. And to show how limited this power was the people in my group had a spending limit of $1,000,000 per day and they still thought this phone thing was above our abilities. I agreed with that since we had enough to do as it was, and we let the Managers know that as long as we could still order take-out we didn't care what they had to do to make it work. They did not find this funny, but then they had no sense of humor.

This program was created after 9/11 because the first responders found the cell system shut down due to so many people using it at one time.

I think the way the system worked (I didn't pay that much attention since I was not in charge of it) was that you had to dial an access code and that would let you into the cell system. From there you could cut off civilian use or something.

Anyway, unless you are in charge of the electrical grid or a vast system of oil pipelines or the air traffic control system it will not kill you to not be able to make a call during a national emergency.

But if a few vital calls that would need to be quickly made could not get through..... That might kill someone else.