From Hazlitt Magazine, April 5:
Everything is Open
The first lock I ever picked was my own: one day in my sophomore year of high school I came home to find that my bedroom door wouldn’t budge. I must have grazed the lock button with my thumb as I closed the door that morning, or else the internal springs had become loose and excitable from overuse.
I’d gotten into the habit of locking my door before going to sleep. Stories of murders were dominating the local news at the time; two girls about my age whose bodies and bones had turned up by a lake not far from where I lived. It wasn’t clear or logical, even to me, what protection locks were supposed to afford: both victims had been killed while out jogging during the daytime, not snatched out of their beds, and the attacks had taken place along a nature trail and not in a quiet suburb. Still, the steady drip of stranger danger messaging I’d absorbed over the last decade or so meant that any new threat could be absorbed by osmosis and incorporated into the faceless, ever-present figure of the Kidnapper. In this context, my door-locking was less practical than ritual, one that brought me some inchoate sense of safety and wellbeing, like a psychic sugar pill.
I passed the better part of the afternoon jabbing and scraping a straightened paper clip into the hole in my doorknob, waiting for whatever happened inside locks to happen. At one point, nearing defeat, I asked my stepmother if we could go to the hardware store to buy a lockpicking kit. There’s no such thing, she said firmly. I frowned; I was sure I’d heard the phrase before, but it was true that the more I turned the words over in my head the more implausible they sounded. A box full of tools purpose-built for break-ins? That you could just buy like it was a candy bar? Surely that couldn’t be right. But then I heard a click, and I felt the door give way, and suddenly the question was moot, and I allowed it to submerge itself in the lower depths of my subconscious for another decade or so.
*
I don’t know why, exactly, YouTube’s algorithm first shepherded me to LockPickingLawyer’s videos, but I do remember that what jumped out to me immediately was how short they were: two minutes, maybe three, in which he promised to accomplish something that had taken me multiple hours all those years ago. More amazing still: only after clicking on one of the links did I realize that, short as they were, the majority of the videos’ time was taken up with explanatory patter. The actual picking, when all was said and done, was over in a matter of seconds.
LockPickingLawyer’s videos have an almost unvarying formula: they open onto a shot of his chosen quarry on a grey desk. He will introduce himself and in a steady, professorial voice explain the order of the day. Perhaps he has received a package from a fuming locksmith who doubted the veracity of his claims. Perhaps the owner of some upstart channel, hungry for clicks, has attempted to foil LPL with a custom keyway of their own devising. Perhaps he’s decided to demonstrate yet another hopelessly flawed design from Master Lock, which frequent viewers of the channel will quickly come to recognize as a byword for alarmingly shoddy workmanship. Only after the preliminary remarks are out of the way will LockPickingLawyer actually get down to the picking. “Nothing on one, click out of two, three is binding,” he’ll say, narrating the unseen drama unfolding within the device as he runs down the pins until all of them have at last been pushed into place.
He will open the thing once and then once again to show us, as he always says, that the first time wasn’t a fluke. It never is.
On occasion, if presented with a particularly interesting challenge (and any lock that takes more than a couple of minutes for him to subdue would fall out of the ordinary for LPL), he will follow his picking with a kind of autopsy: sliding the keyway out, he will shake loose all the pins and springs it contains, classifying them as he goes—spool pin, serrated pin, modified driver pin—and slot them into the grooves of a tray created specifically for the dissection and study of lock parts.
LPL has catholic taste in subjects: he picks gun cases and front doors and sports cars and hotel safes and school lockers. He unclicks security tags on clothing and booze bottles with the swipe of a magnet. His personal collection of historic locks spans eras and continents: an Indian lock featuring a sculpture of Shiva and a Venezuelan motorbike lock and a bulky Soviet dual-custody padlock requiring two bureaucrats with two sets of keys to open. In one video, he gives us a window into his training routine: a carabiner as thick with locks as a Parisian bridge, which he picks idly while watching TV like others reach for handfuls of popcorn, the movements so smoothly automatic at this point that he can do it all by touch and sound alone.
LPL never shows his face; all we see are his hands working as his voice explains their every movement. Whenever I’ve watched him pick I am always reminded, eerily, of dentistry: delicate unseen instruments probing a void, feeling for where something sticks or another thing wiggles and gives way. Even the little sounds are the same. The resemblance is so uncanny that it’s hard not to half-imagine, as you watch, the sensation of a cold metal hook grazing the ridges of your backmost teeth.
*
But LockPickingLawyer is not merely a dab hand with a shim; he’s at the top of the field in what practitioners refer to as “covert entry” or “locksports,” a man who’s found his strange singular talent and rocketed to the front of the pack. Though for privacy reasons he rarely participates in official contests, LPL won the first competition he ever entered in 2019 and has picked multiple locks that those in the community consider to be “black-belt” level.
But most of the locks LPL demonstrates on his channel present no challenge to him at all. Disconcertingly often, in fact, the products he tests are either so badly designed or so carelessly put together that they can be bypassed in less than the time it would take to fish out the key from your pocket. In capable hands, anything can become a pick: a clothes hanger, an orange juice carton, a twig, even the plastic packaging of the lock itself.
LockPickingLawyer’s fans are many, and they are rabid. In November of 2019, he became the first lockpicking YouTuber to garner more than a million followers (that figure now sits at over four million), and it’s not uncommon for individual videos on his channel to crest that number of views. This popularity has not come without its downsides. In one video, he opens up a locked box sent to him by an avid viewer only to find (to his embarrassment and, presumably, his wife’s displeasure) that a lonely woman has mailed him her lingerie. Delivering the keynote address at SAINTCON, an eerily named cybersecurity conference in Utah that assented to LPL’s stipulation that he be allowed to hide his face, LPL revealed that he’s also been threatened, sometimes less credibly and sometimes more so. He’s had “fans” send packages to his PO box with secret tracking devices inside in the hopes that he’ll carry them home with him and reveal his address. He’s had multiple people hire private investigators to tail him, usually concocting oddball excuses for doing so: that he’s faking a disability for insurance money, that he’s a deadbeat dad shirking child support, even that he’s kidnapped a child. The reason he knows about these stories is because nine times out of ten the PIs these people approach are friends of his. The security community is small, and apparently it defends its own.
The “Great Lock Controversy,” as it would later come to be called, occurred in 1851: Alfred Charles Hobbs, an American locksmith who had traveled to London for the heady fanfare of the Great Exhibition, announced at the Crystal Palace that “all the locks made in this country up to that date admitted of being very easily picked.”....
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