Former President Clinton Calls Wireless a Force for Good or Evil

ORLANDO -- Former President Bill Clinton said cellphones and other wireless technologies can drive the world together or apart. He gave a standing-room-only speech Thurs. to the CTIA convention. On the same stage, former President George H.W. Bush described the importance of wireless communications to the modern presidency.

Too many are left out of an increasingly interconnected world, Clinton said. “It’s still quite unequal -- 1/2 the world’s people are living on less than $2 a day and are untouched by a lot of what you do,” he told wireless executives: “It is unstable, because the technologies that you had used to such good effect, as all of you know, can also be used by terrorist groups to facilitate their operations anywhere in the world.” Terrorism results from alienation, he said.

Clinton stressed the importance of private efforts, many using wireless tools, to improve life. He cited efforts to build a health care system in Rwanda, where electricity and phone coverage is spotty. “We couldn’t function out there if it weren’t for cellphones and solar power,” he said. Haiti’s fastest growing job category is selling calling cards used with cellphones, he said: “It has created a whole new class of entrepreneurs out of street kids who now, instead of winding up living lawless and disorganized lives, will actually be pulled into an ordinary, predictable economic system.”

Making cellphones available in the developing world is important to economic growth, Clinton said: “Last year a World Bank study showed that in the poorest countries of the world every increase in cellphone penetration of 10% increases gross domestic product of those countries by 6/10 of a percent. That’s stunning.” Cellphones link people with foreign markets and create “connections that formerly didn’t exist,” he said.

Clinton is proud his term in office included passage of the 1996 Communications Act, he said. “I signed the Communications Act which opened cable and wireless to both increase competition and come together,” he said: “There’s no question that lots and lots of jobs were created, hundreds of thousands, because of it, and it enabled a flowering of competitive pressures which created a lot of opportunities.”

Bush told listeners “the hour I'm with you is about the longest I can go away from my BlackBerry.” Since leaving office he has become a “blackbelt wireless e-mailer,” he said: “I do love to e-mail.” Noting the importance of telecom to presidents, he described his decision to call a cease-fire in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 while meeting with his top advisers. “Some media reports had even started referring to the ‘highway of death’ leading out of Baghdad,” he said: “I wanted to be sure our commanders in the field agreed with the decision… What happened is something I still marvel at.” Gen. Colin Powell told an aide he wanted to talk with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Bush said: “Thirty seconds later we were talking to Stormin’ Norman, half-way around the world, on a totally secure line.”

Bush described how, as a 1991 coup attempt against U.S.S.R. leader Mikhail Gorbachev was underway, he was boating off Maine. Secret Service agents announced that Gorbachev was on the line. The coup had failed, Gorbachev had been freed from his villa in the Crimea and his first call abroad was to the American president. “Here I was sitting there in Kennebunkport, Maine, loud and clear, talking to this man that the world worried about and until then nobody had been able to communicate with,” Bush said.

Football fan Clinton said he always saw CTIA Pres. Steve Largent as a great player during the career that brought him to the Hall of Fame. “He was part of Newt Gingrich’s troops, and I had to keep reminding myself how much I loved him on the football field,” Clinton said: “For years I had told Hillary that Steve Largent was the best end in pro football… He had great hands and he always kept head about him under all circumstances. When he got elected [to the House], she said, ‘I remember everything you told me about that guy. He’s going to cause you a lot of trouble.'”