Electrostatic shielding is actually about shielding the inside of a closed (hollow) conductor from the outside (the standard deriviation from Gauss's law). If

Electrostatic shielding is actually about shielding the inside of a closed (hollow) conductor from the outside (the standard deriviation from Gauss's law). If the conductor is non-grounded then a charge outside the conductor is fully affected by charges inside the conductor but not the position of all the charges (since the divergence of the field through a closed surface will produce a scalar field that varies with distance to the point at which we are measuring the electric potential so the only thing that matters is how far from the closed surface we are (and assuming all charges are enclosed within the closed surface we can represent them as a net charge at the center of the closed conductor). If the conductor is grounded you are then basically changing the flux with which we can calculate the electrostatic potential at a point outside the sphere (and therefore changing how an external charge will be affected by an internal charge)