White House Tinfoils Teles *

White House officials have stopped unauthorized wiretapping with tinfoil.  Andy Brorwitz reported March 4, 2017, for The New Yorker, that early Saturday morning President Trump ordered aides to cover phones in the White House with tinfoil.

(More fun from The New Yorker.)

Everyone says — if they were asked — that this is exactly what Philpott (not his real name) would tell reporters, if one ever approached him about his hat.

Gigaom.com, an industry leader in emerging technology research, said that tinfoil prevents cellphone, and other electronic device data from being inadvertently erased,

Legally, searching cellphones for evidence has vexed many police departments, and according to Giagom.com when making an arrest, cops should simply stick the cellphones in a Faraday Bag or simply wrap the phone in aluminum foil. This gives the police time to ask for a warrant to search the phone, and also prevent the suspect from wiping its contents in the meantime.

According to Benjamin Philpott, tinfoil stops lots of stuff: "All should do it," he tells everyone, according to hearsay.  "It helps protect the brain."

Philpott, a conspiracy theorist, wears a tinfoil hat wherever he goes, and says that the hat on his head, made with several layers of tinfoil, shields the brain from threats such as electromagnetic fields, mind control and mind reading.

Everyone says — if they were asked anyway — that this is exactly what Philpott (not his real name) would tell reporters, if one ever approached him about his hat.  Even Gigaom.com agrees that tinfoil provides a sensible balance to the issue of incoming signals, which could also stop hackers, accoding to several websites.

Mr. Trump knows this.  If he is covering phones in the White House with tinfoil, it blocks eavesdropping too.  How he found out about former President Obama tapped phones at Trump Tower is not yet known, but without question, White House officials can’t be too careful when it comes to this kind of thing.

Borowitz said Mr. Trump contacted staffers Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer at approximately 6 A.M. and instructed them to purchase enough tinfoil to cover every phone in the building.

According to Google, "wearing a tinfoil hat" means that the individual wearing it is paranoid or has a belief in conspiracy theories, especially involving government surveillance or paranormal beings.  But aluminum foil, and other electrically conductive metals such as copper, can reflect and absorb radio waves and consequently interferes with their transmission. just as Giagom reported.

Radio waves, which carry cell phone signals, are called electromagnetic radiation, a moving electric field that travels at the speed of light, according to Techin.com.  An aluminum-foil barrier cancels that fields, so the radio wave cannot pass through it.  A cell phone surrounded on all sides by foil receives no radio waves:

“While the Faraday Cage formed by aluminum foil surrounding a cell phone keeps signals from reaching it, it also blocks signals coming from the cell phone.” the site said.  “If you sat inside a Faraday Cage the size of a small room with a cell phone, you would not be able to make any calls because the cell tower would not receive your signal. You could communicate with a partner using walkie-talkies inside the cage, but not to anyone outside it.”

Iron and steel are also good conductors, Techin said.  Thus White House Staff will not have to worry about this area of the building.

"Steel-framed buildings and structures often have many cell signal dead zones because the beams form unintended Faraday Cages, blocking radio waves (of all kinds)."

The U.S. Capitol's dome is made of cast iron, and was designed by Thomas U. Walter, according to Google.  It was constructed from 1855 – 1866, and built with 8,909,200 pounds of ironwork bolted together.  Mr. Trump most certainly will not need to worry about radio waves or even mind control with this dome protecting him.  No concerns here.  But those phones in the Oval Office, and elsewhere. That's a problem.

But there are drawbacks, especially regarding the hats.  While a group of MIT students found helmets did shielded their wearers from radio waves over most of the tested spectrum, according to The Atlantic, it actually amplified other frequencies.

”While the MIT guys' tongue-in-cheek conclusion — ‘the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC’ — maybe goes a few steps too far,” Matt Soniak, the author said, “their study at least shows that foil helmets fail at, and even counteract, their intended purpose....”

Not to worry.  Wrapping telephones, or "teles," in tinfoil does actually work.  President Trump was wise being cautious. It's comforting to know he wasn't wasting money.


^* Fake News.