Can This Material Protect Your Home From The NSA, Electromagnetic Radiation and EMP Attacks?

October 26th, 2015

Awake Goy

There is nothing quite like the image of a tinfoil hat to get people chuckling over the paranoia of “the conspiracy theorist” who takes precautions against brain scanning and electronic mind control.

But if one topic has gone from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact, it is government surveillance. Even more than the “revelations” of Edward Snowden, it was the way the system came out against him, as well as the further rollout of surveillance-friendly legislation that has convinced many average people that indeed sometimes they are actually watching you.

Various solutions have been offered about how to protect your privacy while connected to the Internet or when using your mobile phone, but one new product holds the potential to protect you at the source: your home. It’s not quite tinfoil but it does claim to offer a physical shield against surveillance and attack.

Conductive Composites is a company based in Utah (home of the NSA’s mega data center interestingly), which makes small cases and enclosures for shielding electronics. The company claims that their lightweight material made by layering nickel on carbon could be scaled up and essentially turn your entire home into a Faraday cage capable of blocking efforts at snooping, while also offering protection from electromagnetic radiation and EMP attacks.

As Defense One explains, Faraday cages are in fact routinely used by the military and governments to secure their own sensitive locations:

Today, Faraday cages are all over the place. In 2013, as the College of Cardinals convened to elect a new Pope, the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel was converted into a Faraday cage so that news of the election couldn’t leak out, no matter how hard the paparazzi tried, and how eager the cardinals were to tweet the proceedings. The military also uses Faraday cages for secure communications: Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities or SCIFs are Faraday cages. You’ll need to be in one to access the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, or JWICS, the Defense Department’s top-secret internet.

The ongoing threat from EMP attacks, whether man-made or natural, is an additional concern that has become more grave as our society is now fundamentally dependent on computer systems.

Lightning strikes and other large electromagnetic pulse events—such as, say, a high-altitude nuclear explosion or geomagnetic storms caused by solar winds on a larger scale—can destroy electrical and electronic systems, inducing currents in conductors within them and overloading them. Just as generators create electricity by passing a wire through a magnetic field, a strong electromagnetic wave can create current within anything conductive it passes through.