In early 1944, the Office of Strategic Services purchase 1,000 specialized pocketknives made by Schrade. Instead of regular blades and tools, these were lock picking knives, with one small blade, three different picks, and two rakes. Able to easily pass as a normal pocketknife on casual inspection, nearly all of them were issued out to OSS Secret Intelligence agents across the European, Mediterranean, and Far Eastern theaters of operation. Today only a few are known to survive…
OSS Equipment Catalog from Headstamp Publishing:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/purchase/p/oss
CIA Equipment Catalog from Headstamp Publishing:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/purchase/p/cia
What’s good for Spies is good for Thieves! I really wonder how many of those ‘pocket-knife’ lock-pick sets ended up in criminal hands after WWII. A good idea for a video, how many covert-ops equipment ended up in the hands of criminals in peace-time.
According to https://www.timhunkin.com/94_illegal_engineering.htm
…The introduction of much more powerful ‘high explosives’ presented more of a challenge, particularly after the first world war, when many soldiers with first-hand experience of using them returned to civilian life. It was during the 20s and thirties that safecracking gained its notoriety…
Speaking as someone who spent a lot of my professional life processing burglary and B&E crime scenes, I can assure you that fancy lockpicks and the finesse to use them are rarely part of the burglar’s repertoire’.
The most common means of entry is by way of windows in doors that are far too close to the latch. Simply break the pane, reach inside, and unlock the door normally.
“Security” doors and filing cabinets with Yale-type locks generally unlock pretty quickly when a screwdriver is hammered into the lock and given a good hard twist with a pair of Vice-Grips on its shaft. The ignition switch on most pre-2000 automobiles doesn’t even require the hammer or the Vice-Grips; the screwdriver itself will do the job.
(“But officer, I couldn’t find my car keys and I didn’t want to be late for work!” Every traffic officer has heard that one at least once.)
As for safes with complex combination locks, most people pick very simple and easy to remember combinations, like their birthday. They also tend to write them down, often on a piece of masking tape stuck up inside the kneehole of their desks.
It’s the same with computer passwords. The most common ones other than the owners birthdate are;
123456
PASSWORD
TRUSTNO1 (a favorite of X-Philes and other conspiracy theorists)
Or their dog or cat’s name; yes, FLUFFY and MUFFY are quite common.
So don’t worry about spy gadgets in the hands of criminals. The bargain bin at Lowe’s generally has all they need for under $5 a pop.
clear ether
eon
My father – who sold and installed office furniture back in the day – once told me that most locking file cabinets before the ’70s or ’80s had gravity-dependent locking mechanisms. If you turned the file cabinet upside down (mind you, a full file cabinet can be pretty heavy) the lock would release automatically. So, not especially stealthy, but easy enough to accomplish without tools.
In the lab we had a locked filing cabinet for evidentiary paperwork. But the metal is was made from was s flimsy that everybody quickly figured out that it could be opened just hauling on the file drawer handle and kicking it on the side to “bounce” the lock.
The scary part? The manufacturer claimed that it was a “classic design once used by the Manhattan Project“.
Maybe the Russian “atomic spies” didn’t have to work all that hard to find out what we were doing back then.
cheers
eon
Yeah… Well.
Here’s a clue for anyone thinking that anything is particularly “secure”. That’s a phrase that really only ought to resonate for honest people, ‘cos the rest of us sorry bastards are constantly looking at supposed “security measures” and thinking… Thoughts like “How can I get around that…?”
I don’t particularly care what you put in between me and my target: I’m getting in there, if I have to. If that means eliminating a padlock, or destroying a battalion of infantry, I’m getting in there.
Here’s a couple of words and concepts that ought to make you question everything you think you know about “security”: Broco-Rankin. Exothermic lance.
https://www.officer.com/tactical/ems-hazmat/environment-hazard-protection/product/10048703/broco-inc-and-rankin-industries-inc-breachers-arc
That there is the development of what we first started really screwing around with back in the late 1990s, out in the Combat Engineering part of the Army Corps of Engineers. The early version of those kits equipped each and every one of the “inspection teams” that went into Iraq after the 2003 invasion, and they saw extensive use. Nothing that the Ba’ath party faithful “secured” behind even the most extensive security lasted more than a few hours under the ministrations of those tools, to include some fairly impressive world-class vault doors. The guys behind those torches saw some things, things that supposedly (per the media) weren’t there.
You put a US Combat Engineer on your breach team, and you’re not going to be stopped by much, should they be equipped per the standards for whatever mission they’re given. Those Broco torches are impressive bits of kit, that pretty much render irrelevant anything you put in front of them in the way of “security” features. It’s hard to do “Lock” when you’re a puddle of freshly-molten steel…
Only thing that amazes me is that there isn’t more awareness of these tools, on both sides of the “Law-abiding” line. Few in the civilian security industry seem to be aware of the potential, and even fewer of the “bad guys” appear to be, as well. Probably a net “Good Thing”, TBH. I’m pretty sure that if I had to, the local bank vault would be child’s play to get into…
I saw a demo of the original “thermite lance” back in the Seventies. Just a piece of pipe with a thermite gel load with a hole down the middle, and a hookup to the O2 cylinder from an oxy-acetylene welding rig.
Put on your welding mask, apron and gloves, hook up the O2, light it, and everybody else stand waaayy back.
Cut through a cinder block wall like it was cream cheese.
Construction companies around here used them all the time for demolition work. Faster than using a bulldozer and easier to get into places a ‘dozer generally wouldn’t fit.
Yes, they were used in few bank heists, too. Why stick the place up in broad daylight and demand somebody open the vault when you can DIY through the back at 2 AM?
No matter what Civil Defense claims about vaults as “bomb shelters”, these things were the real reason for most post-1980 bank vault walls and doors having liners of materials similar to the heat-shield tiles on the old Rockwell STS.
cheers
eon
The only counter to something like an exothermic lance that I can think of is making the environment around the target an explosive vapor hazard such that you don’t dare use anything that could ignite it…
How you go about making that happen, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to get into it yourself, I’ve no earthly idea. Not sure that it’s a practical solution to “security issues”, in that you’re basically forcing the creation of things that are just as, if not more, of a threat than just leaving it out in the open and putting a guard on it…
I mean, yeah… Maybe if you put your safe inside an LPG tank? Maybe?
You can always drain the tank, I suppose.
“Warning: this safe contains 1 pound of black powder”.
Not that that’s actually legal.
The only real security I can think of was what was shown in Colossus; The Forbin Project (1968/1970; it was shelved for two years before Universal finally released it.)
Nothing much, just a void space between the outside world and your vault, loaded with enough long-half-life isotopes to make any intruder glow in the dark for the next couple of centuries.
Pretty secure, but once you put something in there you’ll have a job getting it out again.
cheers
eon
It’s facts like that which make me question the entire concept of “Security”. Like “Secrecy”, the whole thing is an illusion.
The Maginot Line proved the theorem that there is really no such thing as security; whatever you put up can always be breached or, more likely, bypassed. About the best you can do in terms of “battlefield preparation”, which is all “security” really amounts to, is hope to shape the battlefield such that your actual active measures have the advantage, and if you shortchange those on the theory that they don’t need to be either good or motivated, well…
France lost in 1940 mostly because they’d put way too much confidence in the idea of “(Static) Security”, thinking that the Maginot Line would keep them safe. What they should have done was said to themselves “Well, we lost all that we did in the Great War because we were front-asswards tactically and technically… Let’s not do that again, shall we?”, and then gone on to put people like de Gaulle in charge of the French military, rather than the dumbasses who tried to re-iterate WWI-style “Chateau Generalship” in 1940.
France never should have lost. On paper… If they’d bothered to stay on top of things, and done the necessary, they’d have been a lot more likely to come out of it all with nation and frontiers intact. Instead, they locked themselves in a mental vault formed from the Maginot Line and recidivist thinking, and the Germans took the tactical/operational equivalent of a Broco torch to the whole shoddy edifice of French operational planning.
Never should have happened. Yet, it did. Which just highlights the effect of shoddy thinking on everything “Security” related. There’s always someone who is going to be more on the ball and more motivated than you are, sooooo… Stay on top, stay motivated, and be ready to deal with whatever comes dynamically.
The movie “Thief” (1981) publicized that sort of torch to the masses, as the climactic scene of the big heist. There’s even a clip of the scene on YouTube. (They didn’t use props in the film; that’s a real thermal lance cutting through a real safe.) I’m not going to link to it because links tend to be frowned on by spam filters, plus as a blatant copyright infringement it may disappear, but “thief movie thermal lance” should find it.
They do not make it look easy and comfortable to use — because, well, it isn’t. But it does get the job done.
I first ran across it in a novel; Operation Breakthrough, the fifth “Earl Drake” novel by Dan J. Marlowe, 1971.
Incidentally, one of Marlowe’s “consultants” was an actual retired bank-robber and safe-cracker. So even then, this sort of thing was part of the crooks’ “tool kit”.
cheers
eon
Yeah yeah. And the Sphinx from Mystery Men can cut guns in half with his mind. Just grab your exothermic letter opener and clean out your local bank. It’s a snap! Opening up some crap Iraqi safe surrounded by hundreds of friendly armed troops seems not too challenging. Doing so under the Thief movie circumstances seems more challenging. As this is seemingly not a common occurrence I suspect using the magic torch is in reality not so simple.
If you don’t mind making some noise, the simplest method is a Linear Cutting Charge. Depending on what they’re designed for, they can be loaded with RDX, plastic explosive, or whatever, and can cut through anything from half-inch steel plate to steel-rebar concrete to, well, blowing the hinges off a bank vault door and then severing the locking bars.
They’ve been in use since the 1950s and by now there are special ones for almost anything.
Probably the only reasonably sure method of protecting high value assets from theft is hiding them and making sure nobody finds out where they are.
clear ether
eon
you have to put your safe INSIDE a safe…
Linear cutting charges are something that the US military never really got into using, down at the tactical level. The usual thing we do with them is separate rocket stages in flight with them, while the British and German armies like to use great big ones to take out bridges and such.
I’m not really sure why we didn’t adopt them more, but the US military chose to basically stay with the same set of pre-made 15 and 40 pound shaped charges we had in WWII. I’d have liked to have the flexibility afforded by linear shaped charges for doing things like cutting structural members, but they apparently figured that steel-cutting charge techniques were effective enough, and more flexible. Also, more affordable. The British and German linear charges are kinda pricey, and while they’re nice, they’re also not as flexible when it comes to preparation and emplacement. You almost have to have the little tracks in the bridge components to slide the charge legs into, and… Yeah. It’s complex, and the American technique has always been “P for Plenty”, and don’t bother with the elegance…
Linear shaped charges are coming more into use, these days, for urban ops. There are some really nice flexible ones that deploy more-or-less like tape, and do lovely things to structural steel and doors. Good luck getting your hands on any, outside the SF community, however.
Supposedly, there was someone developing what amounted to a binary expanding spray foam explosive that you could use to do all sorts of lovely energetic things with, like fill pre-made plastic or cardboard forms in order to get the shaped-charge effect going. No idea of where that ended up going, but I’d wager that the whole thing probably failed on the same thing that kills a lot of lovely ideas: Ugly realities like inconsistencies in density and what-not. Same crap that killed the lovely ideas about Fuel-Air Explosives for mine clearance…
Although, I do love the idea of having a couple cans of effectively safe and inert components that I could put into one of those epoxy dispenser setups, and get good-enough plastic explosive effects out of… Energetics will probably get there, but by the time it’s all perfected, there will probably be something else that’s more effective and more efficient. In the history of military technology, by the time you’ve got the technique and gear perfected, it’s usually been rendered obsolescent by something else entirely. It’s about like the battleship; we got those figured out, and then those pesky bastards with those ridiculous wood-and-canvas flying things got going, and…
About all you can really hope for is that some of the cool stuff you developed for your old obsolete dinosaur gear can be repurposed for newer uses. I understand that a lot of the basic stuff behind the battleship fire control computers is baked into things like the JDAM, so… Yeah, it’ll eventually still be somewhat relevant, but effectively unrecognizable.
Nothing is truly secure unless nobody knows where the valuable subject is truly located. My stupid idea for a “secure vault” full of valuables is to have a publicly known comically huge (secretly fake) vault that’s actually stuffed full of traps (tripwire-triggered auto-loaded main battle tank cannons, redundant minefields, toxin-tipped caltrops, and even poison gas) and then have my real vault located in some other place where nobody would even think to look. Then again, that idea is totally illegal…
On an Evil Overlord type list I once did (“What I Would Do If I Were A Starship Commander”) was this;
The red Self-Destruct button, on my desk, in my Ready Room, when pressed, would fire the .50 caliber machine gun concealed in the ceiling- aimed at the desk. I can always get a new desk from Stores.
The real Self Destruct button would be in my closet, in back, at the bottom of a stack of boxes, in a box labeled “Baby Pictures”.
It would be in the very bottom of the box, under a large stack of… actual baby pictures.
The best place to hide something is where nobody will think to look for it.
(Drat. Now I have to find somewhere else to hide that damned Self-Destruct button…)
clear ether
eon
Security through obscurity is a definite thing. If you don’t know where your crap is, how is anyone else going to find it…?
There are several Roman- and Saxon-era hoards in Merrie Olde Englande that have been found by various and sundry fortunate types whose original owners relied on that technique, and it obviously worked pretty damn well for several centuries…
Same-same with a lot of the Spanish gold from their New World conquests; the wealth is there, but it’s scattered at depth. The Spanish revenue services have been pretty good at recovery from the poor fools who went to the effort of finding and recovering it from the ocean, however…
In the end, it’s all an illusion. Gold is not inherently valuable, just like bitcoin. It’s only worth what the guy you’re trading with is willing to give up for it, and in a lot of contexts, gold isn’t going to get you what you really need. Neither will bitcoin. Intrinsic value is in the eye of the beholder, and if they don’t behold it, you ain’t got it. Imagine the value of gold if Elon Musk or someone else recovers everything we think is at 16 Psyche? That’ll be an ugly day for the goldbugs…
Gold, silver, platinum and etc. all became “valuable” due to scarcity and fungibility. They’re too soft to make good weapons, but they also don’t decay. So gold coins can become a gold tiara and vice versa; all you need is a forge and a mould.
Adulteration is easy to detect, thanks to schist, a stone that has come down to us as the “touchstone”. Scrape the edge of your coin or etc. across a flat one. Pure gold leaves a yellow streak, gold adulterated with silver, a white one, gold adulterated with copper, a red one. This alone made gold a monetary metal; cheating was very difficult to get away with. (See Connections by James Burke, Chapter 2, “The Road from Alexandria”.)
BTW, the other valuable metal in those days was tin. It was the metal which, combined with copper, put the edge on the Bronze Age. And at least one war was fought over it; the so-called “Trojan War”. See Where Troy Once Stood by Iman Wilkins, or just read chapters 31 and 32 of Trojan Odyssey by Clive Cussler. (Yes, I am completely serious.)
Bitcoin exists only in computers, which somehow “mine” it by creating algorithms. I think of it like the use of one “paper” asset as collateral to buy another that led to the 1929 stock market crash. A house of cards eventually collapses under its own weight, no MICLIC application required.
After the fall, expect gold and silver to come back as the primary means of exchange. There’s only so much ,and it will be there until the Earth is no more.
cheers
eon
Besides scarcity, they were:
-Really easy to work (in a time when most other metals were almost impossible, if not undiscovered)
-Corrosion resistant, in an era when coatings and treatments didn’t exist
-“Pretty” means of displaying status, as you said a completely subjective thing (and one nobody except h00drats really values any more)
All of those are nonfactors today. They’re useful in electronics, but of course pragmatic application and utility as a means of exchange are mutually exclusive.
Scarcity now works against them. Population growth and per-capita productivity vastly outgrew the supply of any material (or handful of materials) to represent the full value of a modern economy, and anything less is the stuff bank runs, etc. are made of. The only way it would work is if the government artifically decreed a higher exchange rate, i.e. made it just another form of fiat money. I know some people treat it like a curse word, but everything is (and has to be) fiat money in 2025.
Extension of this concept, in the Polish communist army; the last batch has been sold in 2024 by the official Polish Army surplus agency.
Wz 1969
https://spslupsk.policja.gov.pl/sps/aktualnosci/108457,O-policyjnych-nozach.html