A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

Author:Geoff Manaugh [Manaugh, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 9780374710286
Google: QSSNBwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00V35U0TM
Goodreads: 25819392
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-17T04:00:00+00:00


Secret Keys Hidden in the Objects Around Us

TOOOL was founded in the Netherlands by security researcher and lock expert Barry Wels. TOOOL describes itself as “a growing group of enthusiasts interested in locks, keys and ways of opening locks without keys,” and now has a handful of chapters around the world. It runs free monthly workshops at various locations throughout the United States, from Austin to Los Angeles, the Bay Area to Philadelphia. Chicago also has a chapter.

On a windy evening punctuated by mist and light rain, my wife and I drove out to a quiet residential neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest periphery, passing endless low-slung warehouses and new brick lofts. That month’s TOOOL gathering was being hosted in a space called Pumping Station: One, or PS:One. PS:One is a six-thousand-square-foot, garage-like space with a ramshackle meeting room in front. It is furnished with old couches and some worktables. A small warehouse full of equipment stands in back, with the air of a permanent Maker Faire. Scanners, 3-D printers, welding stations, multiple laptop computers, custom-made plywood bunks and shelves, and other random pieces of gear await their next user; these assorted bits and bobs included a half-assembled DIY vending machine, a remade soldering iron that burned images into wood, and some behemoth piece of machinery—more like a stranded whale—in the far background that I was unable to learn anything about. By the time we all left, a little before 10:00 p.m., the back room was still buzzing. Empty beverage cans proudly touting their drink’s caffeine content seemed as good an indication as any that the folks chipping away at their latest projects were used to tinkering well into the early morning.

Our instructors that night were Patrick Thomas, his wife, Krystal, and John—known as Jack—Benigno. The other attendees included two teenage boys who had driven in from the suburbs—apparently more than an hour each way—a few couples in their late twenties, and a handful of enthusiasts who had come armed with their own, self-made picks. At one point, all the action in the room stopped so we could admire a set of handmade, bamboo-handled picks brought in by one of the attendees; we passed the set around to whistles of admiration.

Our evening began with a slide show giving us the most basic overview of what makes a lock function: how it works, what the cylinder is, how to find each individual locking pin, and the purpose of the different lockpicking tools at our disposal. There was no music and the lights were bright. Arrayed before us on heavily worn worktables were padlocks and cylinder locks, the latter labeled with numbers corresponding to their level of difficulty. The most basic had two internal pins only, and these were astonishingly easy to pick; these then went up to six-pin locks, beyond which a range of spooled locks and padlocks awaited us.

The types of picks are seemingly endless. The most commonly found ones are used for opening pin-tumbler locks. There are rake picks and snake picks, hook picks and ball picks.



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