Breaking into locks once reeked of criminality; if you dared to try it, you did so in secret, because if you were spotted, folks would assume you were up to no good. Now, picking locks has gone legit.**********
Recreational lock pickers meet regularly in community centers around the country, challenging each other to break new locks as casually as others nearby work to break the Queen's Gambit.
On Web culture blogs, fans of locksport enjoy a place besides cryptography enthusiasts and DRM hackers as practitioners of a morally defensible, geeky dark art.
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It's 20 hours before the third annual Dutch Open lock-picking competition will begin, but the room is already packed with 50 or so men and women wielding burglar tools and representing the international steel bolt-hacker diaspora.*