Mon Feb 27, 2017 10:12 pm by madsamurai
My 2-cents on this... I got into lock picking originally as a potential prepper skill, I figured if I need to find food after the apocolypse a lot of it would be behind locked doors, so it would be a good thing to know just in case. However I've since fallen so in love with this stuff I've decided to make a career in locksmithing and am trying to learn everything I can about locks. From that perspective, I'm pretty happy that it's possible to find this information, as the traditional secrecy of locksmithing is counter-productive for a guy who wants to apply for his first job with some confidence that he knows at least a few things and isn't going in as a total newb that has to be taught everything. Even my college texts say "You'll learn more about X when you're employed" and leave it at that, and to me that's been incredibly frustrating.
There's a phrase in the programming community: Security through obscurity. It basically means my site is secure because nobody is aware of the security flaws in my code. This is the same thing. Security through obscurity is a myth, and imho, a dangerous one. It's the equivalent of putting a fake lock on your door and hoping everyone believes it's a real lock so you won't get robbed. Hiding a flaw doesn't make it go away. Whether a lock is susceptible to picking or bumping or drilling or torquing or bypassing or punching or whatever else really doesn't matter... it's flawed either way, and anybody with a brain and some time will eventually figure it out if they want to. As a I consider my future in locksmithing, I want to have some confidence that the locks I sell people are secure, and that means knowing all of the ways locks are attacked and which ones hold up to those attacks and which ones don't. I also think people in general should have access to that information so they don't end up wasting their money on junk security (which is the primary offering in the US). If more people watched videos that showed how easy it is to drill locks, they'd stop buying those locks and more locks would come to the market with real drill resistance. As it is, people believe whatever is on the box because there's nothing to tell them different. That's why you only see Master locks in every hardware store and Stack-On gun safes in every outdoors shop. They can keep selling crap because the general public doesn't know any better.
Do criminals study this stuff? I don't know... I suspect there are some that do, but we're well past the point of stopping them if they want to. Heck, I had an Anarchist's Cookbook when I was 14. If I could get that, any criminal who wants to make pipe bombs could get it just as easily. There's also the argument that nobody's a criminal until they commit a crime, and I'd say if just about anyone on this forum decided to do that, they could get into about anything they wanted... how can we protect against that and still have locksport and cool picking forums? You can't predict people, therefore it is impossible provide information to people who are guaranteed to only do good with it. The only way to keep criminals out is to spend the money on quality security, period. Pretending they don't know as much as we do is pure hopeful idealism.