But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals.
But Tobias isn’t crazy. Far from it. He’s a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn’t play games, he rarely sees movies,Welded Gabion Box, he doesn’t attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to hack them, too.
Some Marc Weber Tobias problems rattle companies. Others end as consulting contracts or dropped lawsuits or forcibly improved design. But all Tobias problems, like all hacker stories, start with a nerdy kid in a basement workshop, taking things apart.
Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn’t notice and wouldn’t care anyway. He’s as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.
Between stabs at his salad, Tobias hands me his latest idea of fun: nearly 300 pages of self-published hacker-porn detailing his attack on the allegedly uncrackable Medeco high-security lock. “Trust me, this will cause a goddamned riot!” he says, dabbing at tears of joy with a paper napkin. “Oh yeah, this is way, way bigger than the liquid explosives thing!” And he’s right, it is bigger—and with way, way bigger consequences.
Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site’s streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration’s prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.
Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It’s a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you’ve just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue,hesco bastion-Americans Must Oppose Abortions at Military Bases, Pro-Life Leader Says LifeNews.com, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.
The problem, if you’re a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights,t post, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn’t just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.
We’ve covered key card hotel locks over seafood, in-room credit card safes over sandwiches. While we ate a decent steak dinner, Tobias used the house crayons to diagram one of the largest jewel robberies in history; over dessert,Gabion box with pvc coated-Oregon Military Department Facilities Address-Wire Mesh, he showed me how a person less honest than himself would pull the heist again.
Like many exceedingly bright people, Tobias has the exhausted air of a know-it-all. Over dozens of dinners, he has walked me through how to pick simple locks (“Uh, is there something wrong with your hands?”) and bypass combination dials (“A brain-damaged monkey could do it faster”). He has described how to outwit security technologies like motion detectors (“Duh”), face-recognition software (“It’s stupid, even if you think about it!”), fingerprint scans (“What child came up with that?”), and heat sensors (“You can get this one—maybe”).
Marc Weber Tobias can pick,Stone Cage, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters.
Illustration: Tetsuya Nagato
But to Tobias, pissing off The Man isn’t the point, not entirely. Nor is it, entirely, to make himself famous or rich—not that he’s allergic to either outcome. The point, he says, is to “make shit better.” Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he’s not a bad guy—he’s just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren’t actually locked, safe,gabion, or secure. At least, not from people like him.
Thinking like a criminal is Tobias’ idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you’ve never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He’s the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock,Gabion Mattress-Abortion and Military Facilities The Effect of the Burris Amendment in the Departme, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.
