 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today's Birkman lunch talk featuring Jeff Manaw. And before I introduce Jeff, I'd like to just do a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, it's important to note that these lunch talks are webcasts. These talks happen under surveillance. And so as you have opportunities to interact, to ask questions, you'll want to bear in mind that you're sharing this for posterity. Second of all, there's a hashtag. The default hashtag for these lunch talks is hashtag Birkman. I don't know, though, Jeff, do you have a hashtag for Birkman's Guide to the City that you'd like people to make use of? I don't have a preferred hashtag, but I suppose hashtag Birkman's Guide makes sense. Right on. Okay, so hashtag Birkman if you want to share outputs from this talk in real time on Twitter or elsewhere. And so with that, let me just turn to introducing this person to my left, Jeff Manaw, because I'm having this delicious experience of which I never tire, this internet experience of meeting an old friend for the first time face to face. I've known Jeff's work for 10 years and have interacted with Jeff in virtual space, corresponded over the years, off and on, and have always been inspired and enlivened by the work that he does. I knew him in the first instance through his blog, building blog, out of which this book issued some years ago. Building blog is this and it's an ongoing vital presence to this day, an ongoing searching entanglement with architecture, the built environments, and the ways in which space and time and environment and design kind of all come together fruitfully and magically and problematically often as well. In our imaginations, in our social lives, in our cultural lives, in our history, a lot of that entanglement has to do with digital space, with technology and infrastructure, and both how technology and infrastructure invagle themselves into the built environment and the world around us and how they impact that world. But it's also crucial, I think, to Jeff's is kind of method as a thinker and a maker and a writer and explorer of these realms. The fact that this is work that takes place in the open, in public, thinking, making ideas and speculation in online space, that at the same time also is a profound exploration of the world as well, the physical world as well. And I just wanted to read a short paragraph from building blog that gives an example to me of the kind of playful speculative way that Jeff has melded the digital and the physical in imagination as well as in actual space. So in this very short passage, it's really a caption, Jeff's talking about the work of Alexander Dragulescu from the Media Lab. Alex was making visualizations of spam into kind of these amazing barbed angular construction sort of houses in real space. So Jeff writes that, so Alex's project, these kind of vast installation constructions generated by computer program that accepts as input junk email. Various patterns, keywords, and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures. Jeff writes, it is spam in architectural form. If you applied this to large-scale architectural design, you could actually live inside junk emails, computer viruses, and unsolicited ads for Viagra. You could also turn digital photographs of your last birthday party into elaborate architectural structures. Export your PhD thesis as a five-level inhabitable object, transform every bank statement you've ever received into a small cubist city. Your whole DVD collection could be informationally represented as a series of large angular buildings, or you could reverse the process and input sketch-up diagrams of Notre Dame Cathedral, generating an inbox-clogging river of spam. Email the Great Wall of China around the world in an afternoon, turn the collected works of Mies van der Rohe into junk email and send it anonymously to the director of the National Building Museum, who then deletes it without knowing what it was. So this kind of interpenetration of built space and the digital environment, digital objects, and architectural objects in the imagination, as much as in planning and design, is what's always excited me about what Jeff does. I'm curious, intensely curious, about the burglar's guide to the city. I have not had the chance to read it yet. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it. Jeff said to me yesterday that it's not about theft, it's not about stealing, but it is about a certain kind of criminal perspective, and I think that probably is a fitting motto for so many projects around the Berkman Center as well. So without further ado, I turn it over to Jeff Manon. Well, yeah, thank you, Matthew, for the generous introduction and also the reminder of the spam architecture project, which is a fun one. And yeah, thanks for coming on a rainy Tuesday and to hear more about burglary and architecture. I appreciate it, and thanks for the invitation and hosting me here. So yeah, as Matthew mentioned, what I wanted to do this afternoon, or just barely this afternoon, was introduce you to some of the themes of a Burglar's Guide to the City. It's a new book of mine that just came out, actually a week ago today, came out on April 5th. And explain what is a Burglar's Guide to the City, why would someone interested in architecture also be interested in burglary, how does burglary differ from theft, those kinds of things. And then I've chosen a couple things that I thought would be more interesting to bring to a Berkman Center audience. So there are an awful lot of things in the book that would be interesting to discuss, but they're also very maybe particular to architecture or particular to a very physical engagement with the built environment. And so some of those I'm going to leave on the back burner. We can get to those in a conversation afterward, but for the time being, I'll foreground certain things that I think have at least some resonance either literally or metaphorically with some of the themes of digital security or the cyber realm broadly speaking. I tend not to use the word cyber very often, but I might pop up once or twice during my talk if you'll forgive me. So yeah, so why, oh, and then also if you've got questions, if it's a genuinely burning question, feel free to ask during the talk, but I'll be wrapping up in only 20 or 25 minutes. And so if you can save towards the end, I think that might be better because there's an awful lot of themes that I think will come out between now and then. And then Matthew will help me moderate some questions. And also I look forward to that. But yeah, so why a book on burglary? What is it that would compel someone who writes about architecture to write about this particular crime? What is this crime's relationship to architecture in the built environment? So as Matthew said, yeah, burglary is not theft. A lot of people, including friends and family have asked me, why did you write a book about thieves? Why do you want to take things that don't belong to you? And the short answer is that not only is that not an interest of mine, but also luckily I did not write a book about theft. I wrote a book about burglary. What's interesting to me about burglary is that it is an architectural crime. You cannot be accused of burglary unless you're inside a building. We'll talk a little bit later about what constitutes a building from a legal point of view because it's actually, it's not at all straightforward and it's really quite interesting. And you in fact don't need to be stealing anything to be accused of burglary. In fact you can be accused of burglary if you have the intention to commit a crime or if you commit a felony within an architectural space. An example I give in the book is if you fire an unarmed handgun in a mine in the state of California you can be accused of burglary. You've committed a felony inside an artificially constructed space and so that would technically be an act of burglary. And then similarly if I cost you on the sidewalk and take your wallet that's again that's unlikely to happen. I'm not a thief. But if I were to do that it would not be burglary because we would not be inside an architectural structure. So again there are some really interesting exceptions to that rule. You may or may not have remembered in maybe what was it two years ago two German artists or rather the chronology of the story was that the two American flags on top of the Brooklyn Bridge mysteriously turned into white flags overnight. It appeared to be some sort of you know prank indicating maybe mass surrender on behalf of New York City or the United States. But it turned out it was two German artists who actually went up stole the American flags and replaced them with white flags that were of the same size and shape. The reason why I mention that is because in so doing they scaled a chain link fence and they went into a space that then allowed them to get to the top of the kind of basically walk up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and take these flags down. So whilst the area that was surrounded by fencing was not in any recognizable sense architecture it was interesting that the NYPD made the argument that in entering into a legally defined space not only could you get these guys with things like vandalism or trespassing but you could charge them with burglary because they entered into what could be legally recognized as an architectural space. But so in any case and we'll come back to some of that. The other thing that just struck me was that you know especially coming from the world of architecture architects and perhaps this is true in the technology field as well but architects love to think that they're the only people who care about architecture. It's a it's a you know it's somewhere between a point of pride that as if only architects are see the beauty in the built environments and are willing to discuss it. But there's also a sense of overlooked almost a melancholy you know here we are wanting to tell everyone about Le Corbusier and no one will listen to us you know if only more people could talk about architecture. But what interested me is that in fact there is another architectural conversation going on not only just that you can talk about buildings with almost anybody in your family or your friends even if it's not you know an academic conversation but there's this other conversation about the built environment happening and it's happening in the world of criminality. So if you read a police report there was in fact a bank heist yesterday in Brooklyn where people tunneled down by cutting through the roof of an HSBC in Brooklyn and stole nearly three hundred thousand dollars in cash but when you listen to police talk about it when you read police reports when you talk to FBI agents who are investigating bank crime when you listen to business owners complain or discuss how someone got into their jewelry store or check caching facility or of course if you talk to burglars and you look at how they look at the built environment if you learn from them how they look at the built environment you realize that they're talking about architecture too. In fact you can see it in a heist film you know where everybody gathers around floor plans and they're pointing out how to get from one room to the next how to get from another building to another. These are these are embarrassingly basic conversations I wouldn't you know it sounds like a Jim Carrey film that you can't figure out how to get from one room to the next and yet this has high drama in the context of a heist. So I really want to focus on this notion that burglary and architecture have an intimate relationship and then in fact burglary and the heist film these are these are it's the most architectural genre of all. So let's get back to this notion of breaking the clothes I'll talk about this in a second. So I mentioned the idea of a mine might be you could burglarize a mine by shooting a gun in it you could burglarize the Brooklyn bridge by climbing a fence and so this comes down to the thing called breaking the clothes it's a really interesting legal argument the clothes is basically the same word as an enclosure so you can think of it as an invisible geometric plane that defines an architectural shape and can be admitted to a court of law so for example if there is a Jeep Wrangler parked on the street with its hard top off if there is a convertible parked on the street as well if there is a screened in porch that perhaps doesn't have its screens installed if you have an open window on the ground floor of your house there's no physical matter separating inside from outside and yet nonetheless there is this legally recognized planar geometry which is the clothes and so this gets into these really really complicated arguments and in fact there's a really interesting sort of almost like a sub theme amongst legal theorists who have a collective feeling of exasperation at the fact that you can effectively enter any kind of complicated geometric you know even these spam architecture things that Matthew was talking about you could enter these into court of law as legally recognized evidence against burglary as long as you have a talented enough or a rhetorically compelling lawyer who could point out that for example connecting one could argue that I am inside a clothes I am in a separate space from you guys because you can connect say this drop down to the the floor or maybe even the corners of this plinth or podium to other parts of the room and you can start defining the spider web of geometric shapes that then becomes legally admissible as architecture so it's a really fascinating and strange and abstract argument that I think has potentially at least has resonance with themes of of of tech and even tech security but how buildings are defined legally is something that I think is a really strange and almost more hazy and example of where architecture and its legal definition goes goes awry but so the burglar then has this relationship to those geometric planes or to those interiors and even to the exterior of a building that is one rather than one of aesthetics or of even historical appreciation it's one of strategy it's one of stealth and it's one of infiltration so a burglar would see the outside of a building where we might see craftsmanship or historical resonance that something might be in a certain style or might be you know making reference to even historical events a burglar will see shadows that they can hide within they might see opportunities for stealth or silence they might be they might see handholds to get from one floor to the next it's a it's a tactical engagement with the same things that we might otherwise simply gloss over as architecture and that comes up through throughout the book but I think will also be clear throughout throughout the day and so I really like that idea as well as I find that it could have resonance with some of the the notion of of digital security which is that you know something appears to be have not have use value but seen from the right angle you realize in fact it's a way in it's not it's a way that you can slip into a structure it's something that you can put to use in a in a sort of diagonal sense I suppose you could say and so again that's the that's the the burglars physical engagement with with the built environment and so in the book an example I give of this is a guy is a gentleman named Bill Mason so I thought I would mention Bill as a kind of preamble to to the real example I want to talk about but so Bill Mason was a cat burglar he wrote a fairly interesting book called confessions of master jewel thief and it details his long and actually quite successful career stealing as it were jewels from the rich and famous actually one of his famous examples was he robbed Johnny Weissmuller who was the actor who played Tarzan and he did so by swinging from the balconies on the on the outside of his high rise so there was a pretty amazing meta level of irony there but so it was funny when Bill Mason wrote this book he was then invited onto Wolf Blitzer's show on CNN and it was interesting because his answer as to why did you become a burglar it was almost an entirely architectural answer you know he just said you know wolf I liked buildings but but even even more than that though he explained that he effectively kind of grew up with building superintendents you know his parents weren't necessarily very hands-on and so he found himself being stewarded into adolescence and adulthood by all of the people who know the back matter of the city what I think is quite interesting about that is that that means that for him it was just as natural to say go through that door or to take the door to the right of the elevators the one that people like myself tend not to take for lack of access you know he is used to the notion of the emergency stairs he's used to the idea of being an attic spaces or rooftops or cellars maintenance corridors and that kind of thing in the book I refer to it as sort of the the dark matter of the built environment and it's around that he's very used to being in and it's a room it's around that he was very comfortable with and so I think it's really fascinating that this notion that if you are familiar with and even fluent in the the other city the backside of architecture almost like the counter architecture of you know the things that make this room possible the ventilation shaft that would be above this drop ceiling etc if you're comfortable with that aspect of architecture then you're sort of being primed for seeing the built environment through the eyes of a burglar and I think that's a really interesting example from from from Bill Mason but it got much more interesting actually when I then spoke to this gentleman named Jack Daxman so Jack it was a pseudonym of a Toronto based cat burglar in fact at one point my wife and I joked that it was actually Tim but in any case so so Jack Daxman is now working in the private security industry and his current employer doesn't know about his background as a burglar and so thus requested requested anonymity in the book but so Jack Daxman was a really really interesting figure and also one of the more interesting perspectives on the built environment so I don't want to brag on architects all day but I thought it was it was very interesting that his perspective on the built environment was was far more interesting than even people I used to teach with at Columbia for example who have a very interesting historical or theoretical point of view but his very strange abstract and tactical relationship to the built environment made him I think one of the more interesting architectural speakers I've ever spoken to and so an example of that was that similar to Bill Mason he was very used to the backsides of architecture to all the all the spaces that someone like myself tends not to enter but so in particular though he gravitated toward this one point that really that really stuck out to me which is that he had figured out a way to use Toronto's fire code as a targeting mechanism and so he explained that the fire code of the city was so regulated so efficient and so ubiquitously applied to the built environment that you could read the external facing details of a building and determine from the outside without ever setting foot inside very accurate estimations about how that building might be internally how it be laid out how many apartments might be on each floor how distant the doors to each apartment would be to the fire exits due to regulations for personal safety even how many people would be allowed to live in a structure of a certain size or age or district of the of the city and so if you know the city well enough and once again I think the sort of cyber examples are quite compelling here or resonances are quite compelling if you know the code of the city if you understand the regulations that created all of these things that we see in which case architecture here becomes almost like an epiphenomenon of code then you can judge without even going into those buildings what you're going to encounter when you when you do in fact go inside and so this notion that fire code presents a vulnerability when seen from that point of view is something that really shocked me actually and seemed like something not many people would consider the idea that these sort of you know the zoning of your neighborhood or the regulations that are meant to keep you safe ironically are the ones that are being used against you in the case of Jack Daxman other parts of fire code that he was explaining were which floors and buildings would have unalarmed fire exits in which case he would deliberately hit apartments or hotel rooms on those floors because then in a pinch if the maid service shows up or if a resident comes home you can then run to the emergency exit open the door and the alarm won't go off so you can know you can get down to the ground floor without giving away that your your escape route and so if you get again if you know which floors have alarmed doors you know which ones you can hit or conversely if you're a homeowner and it's important to recognize that all this of course has a flip side which is that you can use this information as well to keep yourself more to secure yourself even more or remain safe than a homeowner of course if who lives on a floor that does not have an alarmed exit door now knows that there is a vulnerability that they need to shore up and that they are potentially more of a target for someone who sees the city through the the lens of code and regulation but so he went further than that and pointed out some examples that these are things that I I'd actually noticed myself which I'm sure other nearly everyone in the room will also have noticed that if you are invited to a friend's house say for dinner and you've never been there you don't know how to get there or they're having a party you look up their address online one of the first things I'll do is I'll just google the address to get the map I'll see where they are and then I'll plot a route or have it plotted for me but increasingly the the search results that come back are for real estate sites the number one hit is often Zillow or in New York City it might be Corcoran or Douglas element etc if you click on these which I've started doing you know which feels oddly voyeuristic despite it being a web search you know you can learn really thing puzzling things that perhaps your friends don't want you to learn which are everything from exactly how much money they paid for the apartment when they bought it how much the building sold for if they aren't an apartment or homeowner but even more worryingly you can get floor plans we know when my wife and I went to a house party in Harlem about maybe two and a half months ago and before I'd even arrived I'd seen internal photographs of their home I had looked at floor plans these are just you know these are in the first two three web searches and so and also you know I should point out that yes I did also look up my own house and are the in fact actually somewhat ironically our apartment at one point was the show apartment for this entire building that we live in now and so it's it's voluminously documented inside and so if you want to know where our balcony is if you want to know where the fire exits are if you want to know even what locks are installed on the front doors you can basically see it in these photographs that are available online you can see where people's circuit boards are if you need to do something to the power supply you can see any number of different things that that that are given away for free and you wouldn't expect these to be burgers tools hiding in plain sight and yet they are and so one of the things that is interesting there then is what are if any the limits then that you might want to impose on architectural information that is available about your home to give one quick example of that really interested me there was the actually my wife's great aunt who her late great aunt was an archaeologist and a really interesting actually historian in England and she worked for the National Trust and in part of her daily job was the documentation of old historic architectural sites throughout England and one of the things that came up that was really fascinating was that while working on stately homes that are either still privately owned and and you know part of them are opened up for tours or now are entirely run and operated by the state she was instructed to effectively you to deliberately miss draw the floor plans so if you show up and you take a tour of a stately home and you're and you're going through and following the guide the floor plan deliberately leaves off rooms you know side corridors that you don't need to go into as a visitor and then specifically stairways were were something that she was instructed never never to document unless it was vital for visitor access and so what's interesting to me about that are a number of things you know there's you may be familiar with the concept of a trapped street a trap street is a is a is a non-existent route that is added to a map in order to catch other cartography firms when they copy your map because if it includes that street that is not real you can all but instantly prove that they copied your map it's it's copyright infringement and so what's interesting about that is where the map differs from the territory and in this sense it's almost as if you know you could make the argument that through omission there are country houses throughout england that have secret rooms and passages not because they were built that way but because they don't appear in the publicly accessible floor plans but so I mentioned that example as a as a as a long sort of digressive way to suggest that is there something that we could learn from in this example of trapped streets or deliberately misleading floor plans that may or may not be useful for home security I'm not suggesting that that is a good idea I'm simply asking that as a as a kind of discussive question so that perhaps we can we can circle back to that um in a few minutes um but also so Daxman Jack Daxman also pointed out something that um works on both sides of the law and that is the fact that when you move into a new suburban development for example or if there's a new multi-unit apartment building under construction um unless it's a Gary you know many times the individual apartments will have very similar floor plans that are repeated maybe there'll be two or three plans that are repeated multiple times throughout the building or in the suburbs there might be mirror images of certain plans but fundamentally there are five or six housing types that are then repeated over a 35 to 45 house uh sub development and so we pointed out the obvious tactical use of this knowledge which is that if you know how to break into one floor plan uh you know if you can flip it in your head or maybe you don't even need to but you effectively know how to break into not just one house in that area but six houses ten houses fifteen houses and that also works in multi-unit apartment buildings where if you understand the layout of the um a plan you can break into apartment two a three a four a et cetera all the way up to the top um and so as a way of the burglar looking at the building i think that that's a that's also an interesting example of things that don't stand out as security threats which you then realize that if someone above you was broken into and they have a similar floor plan and they too keep their passports in certain closet or they have a fireproof safe and they're only there's only one part of this of the apartment that makes sense to do that um and you also happen to have your safe in that closet or in that room or et cetera et cetera uh then you might want to rethink that once someone has broken into a plan similar to yours but of course this works from the other side of the law them there's an example i given the book of a um i read a lot of police memoirs which is a pretty funny and strange memoir or genre to to become uh compulsively uh to to to read compulsively um but the the the memoirs of retired police and FBI agents are actually really interesting tactical insights into how they look at the city and so one example of those was a book by a gentleman named Michael Cadella who is a retired nypd detective who specifically worked in the in the housing division so public housing complexes and that kind of thing um but so he made the point as well that from a police point of view it's also very useful because if you are targeting uh criminals who live in very large housing blocks and you become very familiar with certain apartment layouts or the layouts of entire floors or buildings then as a police unit um it almost becomes a sort of uh um what would be the word like a criminological groundhog day you're responding to different crimes but in the exact same environmental circumstances you're raiding the same apartment over and over again just on different floors and so that plays uh that has a tactical use from both sides of the law as as do most of these things that i've been pointing out um so in any case just to continue moving um one of the one of the things that is really interesting is that burglary in fact despite the length to which i've been discussing it is actually going down quite precipitously burglary in new york city alone has gone down 87 percent since 1990 so i mean that's that's that's a an astonishing drop it actually got so burglary is down so much worldwide except for china which is interesting we could maybe talk about that later that the economist ran a funny story that was uh the title was where have all the burglars gone and uh what i love about it is that it almost sounded mournful um you know and um jack axman actually even pointed that out that uh there was a sense of melancholy in his chosen career which i think perhaps precipitated his change to this other side of the law to work in security which was that he had once felt that there was a almost a romantic engagement uh george cluney ask um sort of caper field filled lifestyle of being a burglar and now you know you look around and you realize that there's no one else out there where of all the burglars gone and it's almost as if he just gave up he's sort of uh you know he came back from his vacation and and took a job um but so so if burglary is going down that far but yet we are seeing this the rise of these new sources of information about the built environment um you know we're seeing the rise of uh the access getting access to things like photographs of one another's internal apartments or internal photographs rather uh you know where we can look up each other's floor plans um you know it sounds like a kind of a kumbaya moment in society but yet we could also use those things against one another so are we potentially setting ourselves up for a momentary flipping of the balance of power where burglars have the tools on their side again they have the knowledge on their side again and there might be yet another uptick in burglary statistics um it'll be interesting simply to see if that plays out and what are the the the risks of of access to these kinds of tools um and so yeah so the question then would be would this combination of analog and digital burglary tools lead to a return of burglary's previous uh you know sort of a threat to to to architecture and and to us and then also how do we resist and protect ourselves from that um so just another couple quick things I just wanted to mention before throwing this open for a conversation um burglary sounds like something that's very in fact actually the overwhelming majority of burglars are just uh they're not committed by the brightest individuals you know the example that I was talking to my wife about recently was a guy who broke into a kitchen of a restaurant and knocked over a bag of flour uh he stepped in the flour he walked home and left white footprints all the way to his his front door and he was soon arrested uh and you'd be really shocked actually or maybe you wouldn't be um if you look up uh there's so many hits on this it's it's it's sad um but of burglars who rob houses during a snowfall and uh the police literally just follow this the tracks in the footprints back to their their home um you're not always you're not really dealing with the brightest members of society despite the examples that I was I was speaking about previously who are the exceptions to the rule not the rule um but so amidst all of this then that you know it sounds like a burglary is something that might just attack or rather target your apartment or just your building or it might be pulled off by someone who is only vaguely competent um and yet what about what are the prospects of a kind of super burglary how big can burglary be before you know here you have to upgrade it to a different type of crime entirely um there's a great short novel that um that I still think someday should be adapted for film called The Score by Richard Stark and uh it's it's got a great opening scene where a bunch of people meet uh in a kind of country lodge they're around a table one of them has a slide projector it feels like they're about to attend a university lecture and the gentlemen starts showing maps and photographs of this town it's a mining town and I believe south south or possibly north dakota and uh you know it's it's it's a funny scene because the guy seems really hesitant to admit what it is that he's showing them but then suddenly everybody in the room kind of realizes like what is being proposed and it's that the entire town uh it's it's there's only one way in and out there's only one police station that can be commandeered the entire town is is set up geographically architecturally and urbanistically to be the target of a of a super burglary they'll just rob the whole place um so I mentioned that because it sounds like okay surely that's impossible um but it was interesting uh a couple years back there was a case that you may or may not have read about where a city uh I believe he was in potentially a fireman but a a city worker in in New York City retired and when he did so he then had a set of keys that he put on ebay and uh and and it led to a minor security um kind of freak out in the city because what these keys were uh were the keys that are used by emergency first responders to uh bring all the elevators in the high rise back down to the ground floor during the event of a fire uh to get access to subway tunnels to go through all the doors that you know we don't or I'll speak for myself that I don't have keys to enter um to get into water mains to get into all the kinds of the parts of the city that have locks on them that might perhaps escape notice precisely because there's no reason that you might have a key for that kind of thing um but so of course if the wrong people get access to the right keys you set up a very disastrous uh scenario and so um sort of adding to the the bizarre nature of the story an undercover reporter for the New York Post um actually purchased the keys and then uh and then according to this reporter uh verified that they do in fact work and that uh you could in fact basically you know in a James Bond like way seize control of the city using these keys that I know you could of course uh mass duplicate um to go back briefly to Jack Daxman he pointed out that in in Canada there's a there's a vaguely similar key uh they're called crown keys apparently but those are the keys that are used to get into the lobbies of buildings in order to deliver mail so if you've ever wondered how postal workers you'd get into your the lobby of how of your building to drop things off packages letters etc they're using a key to the city that were once again were that to be stolen um could set up some uh quite devious and ubiquitous burglary scenarios but so when postal workers are are mugged in Canada apparently one of the leading theories that the police uh investigate is that the the the mugger um or assailant were was on was trying to get a hold of these keys to to have universal access to buildings around the city so I'll just mention that I think again you know this notion of of um omnipresent uh keys and possibilities of entry I think is something that will be fun to discuss and then finally uh just a very brief mention um one of the other things I I do in the book is I interview some game designers and I just mentioned that because in speaking to game designers and how they look how they engage with architectural environments and the structures that they design for things like games of heists games of burglary games of stealth it's a very interesting and peculiar relationship to architecture because of course as one of the game designers points out to me if you want to design a play something in a game that can't be broken into it's incredibly easy you know there's no there's no that's not the challenge the challenge is not how do I keep players out of a structure or how do I keep players from doing certain things you can do that in a heartbeat the question is how can you dial back security in an interesting way in order to introduce what one of them calls rhythms of vulnerability um specifically to open up blind spots and holes and and vulnerabilities in game environment levels so that players can have uh can be challenged enough to have a good time breaking in but also uh can in fact the the game itself can proceed and so I think what's really interesting about that then is the notion that when you're dealing with architecture specifically as something that someone wants to move through through stealth through illicit entry through infiltration uh by climbing the outside of the building rather than going into the front door um you it's a very different design challenge and of course then you can flip that design challenge and look at it in terms of knowing now that people will do these things and that they might climb a tree branch to get to the second floor or they might drop down from a roof onto a terrace to then come into the sliding door on your bedroom um what are the steps that you can take to protect your house yourself your friends family etc um from the people that are looking at architecture this way and so I think that's just the final takeaway um I simply that all of this uh you know might sound like a sort of delight in the notion of misuse and to a certain extent it is if I just find this very fascinating that there is a um you know we just take for granted that we have to use buildings the way architects intended us to the way that security teams steward us down certain hallways in certain ways um but there is in fact a way of engaging with architecture that is much more hands-on um much more puzzling I'll say to deliver these that word as if we're surrounded by a puzzle that we don't we haven't yet recognized for moral and ethical reasons um but yet at the same time um there is something about this that is just very straightforward that we can think like burglars in order to protect ourselves better and to not fall prey to people who are in fact taking advantage of all the things that um through trust we like to believe uh other people aren't noticing um so I think I'll I'll leave it at that and we can throw it up to some questions and stuff but thanks thank you Jeff that was that was great um and uh we're going to throw it open to questions uh and and just the the modality for that will have a couple of microphones uh I have one and my colleague Dan over here will circulate another so if you have a question for Jeff um just get the attention of one of us and we'll bring a microphone to you so that we can get all of this um properly surveilled um uh and I have a question to just to open things up um uh as as you were as you were talking about breaking the close in particular um that that concept really resonated for me in the context of the FBI's desire to break into the to the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter um and so you know the way in which you talked about um burglary as a as a way for thinking about our own security and also thinking about the co-optation as it were of the the burglars view um by the police by by power of different kinds I just wonder what the kind of resonances um in terms of our digital lives um thinking like a burglar might have for thinking about um our our digital domiciles our digital security our digital identities um and then maybe also how how how do these things get co-opted um how do these this how does this perspective get co-opted by power as well sure um yeah no that's a that's a very interesting um question I I'd say just with the copy out that uh I'm I'm not a digital security researcher and so I would defer to others in the room as far as of of of a genuine answer to that question um but I guess I would say one of the things that is interesting or rather two things that are interesting are there's that question of keys again that that I mentioned um there were some interesting uh articles that I read recently that discuss the difference between having a numeric keypad on your phone for police to get access to versus having your fingerprint to access your phone and the different search warrants that are necessary for the key that you try choose to have and I believe it's you have if you and again I'll defer to to someone who knows more but that if it's the numeric number it's a different kind of warrant and is more secure for you than it would be if they simply need a fingerprint to unlock the key and I think that kind of thing is quite interesting knowing how to lock something based on what keys would or access to keys would be used to get into it I think is is is quite interesting um but another thing that just comes to mind is this notion of um well I guess I'd use the word jurisdiction I think in a somewhat large larger sense where if you can what I think is interesting is that for example if you've got information that you don't want a certain authority to get access to and you can place the information technically and through servers in a different jurisdiction whether it's overseas or it's on you know sea land the legendary micro nation in the North Sea here off the coast of England um you know you get into a question of how does the FBI how does Interpol how do people get access to things um and so what's interesting about that is that you could argue then in this case for the sake of this conversation that um you know that is a that is an attempt to sort of asymptotically move the clothes ever further and further away from the people who are trying to get access to or define it and I think that that kind of uh it's like an acrobatics of enclosure that you could be you could argue is happening with this jury the jurisdiction of data uh and also then I think in in you know it'll sound like an absurd you know maybe like late 1970s era Peter Eisenman graduate project but you could imagine a architectural design challenge to create the most complex clothes imaginable through things that could be added to the external um facing surfaces of a building where it doesn't just have one facade or four facades or the fifth facade of the roof but is this crystalline and strange um cluster of possible closes that could be argued about in different uh levels of a of a of a of a law lawsuit or not a lawsuit but a uh a burglary case um and so I wonder then would that be the equivalent of of of switching up jurisdictional questions or could you even put part of your building through the clothes in another county so that you could uh you could charge someone with different laws in that part of the house but um in any case there and that sounds like Wasserstein Hall to me except much more beautiful but uh do others have questions since you mentioned the New York City Universal Key and the New York Post I recall there being I don't know if this was a really true story or just a fantasy but when the New York Post published their article about that they put a huge picture of the key on the front page and that led to at least some people speculating about whether that was a high enough res picture that somebody could feed it to a 3d printer and duplicate the key um yeah anybody know more about that you or anybody else the the luggage keys that the tsa uses uh to be able to have access to your to your luggage when they come through uh we printed a full set on a 3d printer over at the berkman center um that from a 3d picture right now yeah from a picture rendered out and then and then um and then printed so yeah I mean doing that for uh I mean you know keys are more or less difficult to do um based on the the way that they're they're keyed but yeah that is absolutely and absolutely technically possible just to briefly speak to that and tie it back to the fire regulations uh the thing to remember about keys is that the construction of the cylinders follow rules across the entire production line so even just a brief glimpse at a key in any angle or dimension gives you enough information that by following the rules that you know exist you can get a close enough guess um so even if you have something very blurry something at a horrible angle if you are aware of the codes um as Jeff was pointing out with fire codes and understanding how to move around buildings as a result of them if you understand the the rules in place you can reproduce them from very little additional information I think it's worth pointing out that that skyler who just spoke up picks locks um so so he knows um there is a sense in which beauty and elegance uh is usually found in the way people find clever ways ways to work around the set of constraints that they face to achieve a particular goal so if you think about the design of a building you face economic and physical constraints and beauty and elegance is going to be found in the way you're going to be clever about working around those uh you talk about uh begglers and they view buildings and design and architecture through a totally different uh set of constraints that they face so they view beauty and elegance in a very different way I suppose how would an architecture or design project that would try to see beauty and elegance through the eyes of a burglar look like according to you are you trying to think about this issue is there somebody out there who thinks about that yeah um yeah I guess there's a couple examples that spring to mind um there's a there's an example like used in the book which is a a Canadian artist who now lives in London named Janice Kerbal and she's most famous for for a project uh the 15 Lombard Street project which was the elaborate casing of a bank in London and then turned it into an art project about a bank heist um but she's got another project that unfortunately I believe the name is home fittings I'd have to refer to my own book embarrassingly um but uh home fittings the the notion was that she found an old house in London and then went through it and noted all of the places where you could walk across this old rickety uh hardwood floor that makes a lot of sound um where the shadows are being cast at different times of day she noted all the places where you could stand without casting a shadow and where you could walk even though with exaggerated Monty Python like steps in order to walk through the house without ever making a sound um so that's an art project of course that's not a work of architecture but nonetheless I think it's a really interesting somewhat comedic but um elegant way of dealing with with a strange constraint in that case which is not casting shadows and not producing sound um so stealth and into into sensory registers um but yeah there's um another way of of I think approaching the built environment I mean a lot of examples that come up um you know this this will sound almost uh disappointingly basic but you know are excuse me the sliding paper doors of Japanese traditional Japanese architecture where you know something can be a wall in one instant and then an opening in the next what is the more radicalized pursuit of that type of architecture where you go from wall to opening you go from perhaps window to door you get into a world of of surfaces and apertures that are constantly changing in a dialogue that would be quite elegant and quite interesting and would be thinking like a burglar in the sense that a burglar doesn't necessarily you know I mean because the example I give is that or often give is that you know let's say there's something behind that door that is quite valuable and I want access to it and there's a lock on that door but if these walls are drywall they're not going to be alarmed nobody very few people outside of the State Department or you know military installations will have alarms inside their walls um so what my point is you would just go through the wall a burglar would see a door where we see walls um and so you know this Japanese example I'm giving would simply be sort of the materialization of that strategy and so I think that that's that's interesting as well but so you know I also yeah there's the architecture of handholds there's the architecture of shortcuts a lot of this can be unfortunately very kitschy so I think that one of the problems with thinking like a burglar trying to design a house for that is that it's quite easy not to find elegance but to find almost like Disneyland kind of you know home you know where you might have a secret passage where I pull a copy of Oscar Wilde out of the bookshelf and next you know I've got access to you know the my liquor cabinet or that kind of thing and so you know you can get into the things that are quite goofy but I do think that there would be a really interesting way to combine sort of the elegance of the burglar with architectural thought and architectural theory um but then also I once again I really do genuinely think that the clothes I think is just a fascinating thing that you could play with architecturally and through design I just want to first start by thanking you for your talk which has been really amazing and really truly eloquent and very thoughtful um throughout I'm wondering particularly about in this work how you thought about like making contact with like uh people who had participated in burglary or you know the ethics or legality or morality of sort of what you've particularly said is as a romanticized version of a profession that involves theft sometimes um so uh and how you sort of thought about your book in that context sure um yeah it was interesting for me because you know normally you know I didn't go to journalism school and so the notion of kind of feeling out how that would work was was always interesting and so on you know in one case there or on one side rather there were examples of interviews that you know normally I would either pay someone to transcribe this stuff just because it takes so long and I didn't want to do it um or you even use an online service like Mechanical Turk where you can get people to transcribe for for cheaper um but then when you've got a transcript that is all about you know how to rip off coin coin dealers and hotels and that kind of thing um you know you you think twice about doing that and so there were there were definitely transcripts that I just was like this is not a good idea especially when um if you're sending out the audio file of someone who is speaking to you anonymously and doesn't want their name in a book then you don't want to send their audio file out into the world so that just in case they stick it on a website oh I remember I remember transcribing this interview you know and then you've you've ruined this person's life um but the but but at the same time yeah was I in possession of information about burglaries in Toronto that would have been useful for police investigations um was a question that was interesting I don't think it um it doesn't isn't as nearly as complicated as that example that people are talking about right now which is that extraordinary article in the New Yorker where author Gaye Talies went into a motel that was rigged out like a surveillance apparatus for the owner to watch uh guests having sex and he and he participated in the voyeurism and then wrote and then never told the police and then and potentially witnessed a murder and then he wrote an article for the New Yorker 20 years later and so I think that's a that's a bit more of a sort of the Looney Tunes example of that um but so from the other side though the other the other challenge was not just um well there were many many challenges actually one was if I'm gonna cover a burglar and listen to his story what do I either what am I getting into morally but also how is that person depicted in the book and similarly you know even speaking with Skyler and other people in the locksport community you know when you when you sort of you know I felt like uh you know the the bowl in a china shop to a certain extent you know I come walking into these these uh locksport events and asking everybody questions about burglary I mean the response is you know kind of a big middle finger in the sense that like we're not burglars and these aren't questions that are you know it's a bit like going to um I mean the example he's in the book is like going out to the suburbs and finding people who listen to black Sabbath and then and then talking to them about satanism it just sort of feels like there's there's a there's a there are a lot of assumptions here that are foolish and so um but then from the the other side then was also uh uh was was convincing police to let me do things with them and FBI agents and um that was also tricky so you know the for example one one of the most fun aspects of the research that I didn't get a chance to talk about today was flying with the air support division of the LAPD and so what I wanted to do in a nutshell was basically was literally see the city from an aerial view was to understand what the grid of the metropolis appears to be from an aesthetic point of view but then also how our police tactics applied from the air and what do they see and you know we mentioned that the uh we were talking rather earlier about like the the jack daxman approach to fire code but the police have a sort of similarly interesting approach to the addressing system that that that gives Los Angeles its coherence and the notion that they too have this sort of um they call it the rules of four but this this almost mathematical or in the book I refer to it as a numerological insight into LA um I think is it was really fascinating but so I mentioned this because you know my initial questions again were were ridiculous and and you know they were asking you know so you know if I if I can make a bank robbery how can I get away from the helicopter you know and and just questions that for obvious reasons led to immediate dead ends in the interview and um and and weren't easy to to to to continue past and so yeah that that would mean that was fun just you know as just like the technique of a writer I mean I guess I had to I had to figure out the questions to ask that I knew would lead to the same kind of answer but yet would be very indirect or round about uh you know asking about successful uh or rather criminals who have successfully evaded police helicopters in the past and what they did as opposed to like what can I do how are like how can I tell you know my friends to to do X Y and Z um but so those are those are all interesting you know not not uh not coming off as uh yeah the sort of a haywire writer who doesn't know doesn't know what he was doing and I think there's a question over there we have one here and then I also want to say that that Jeff wrote about that the helicopter flights over LA in the New York Times magazine when when was that uh 10 days ago two years ago so that's that's definitely worth a look there's a question over there during your remarks you mentioned that rates are down all over the world except for in China what might what might explain China's uh rising rates um well there are a couple things there I'm one I just briefly I want to mention this because I thought it was so great there was an article that that uh I mentioned in the book where it talks about burglary rates around China and uh it tries to apply statistical sort of mathematical analysis to it um but what's really great about it was that it came to these amazing conclusions which were that um burglary tends to happen when uh air air temperature ambient air temperature something like seven degrees Fahrenheit to 92 degrees Fahrenheit uh and when when wind speed is is like less than 20 miles an hour like it was just all of these insane statistics that you know got somebody a grant at a university um but yet we're I mean it's very difficult to do anything in China when the temperature is not seven degrees Fahrenheit tonight so it doesn't necessarily surprise me that that's when burglars would choose to strike um but so there's a lot of theories about why that is happening um you know and they boil down to a lot of just the the rapidity of urbanization in China you have a lot of things happening which are that people unused to security needs and therefore not locking up possessions in a way that they would have in a different architectural type if you're not living in a multi-unit tower and you're used to living in a village or if you're not even used to living in cities at all that you are not yet used to self-protection um which isn't you know even to a certain extent is true uh in for why a lot of the burglary rates were high in the United States at one point um but then also uh from the flip side people coming from uh environments where they are now not sure how to make a living or kind of being left out of the economic plans uh are needing to turn to other ways of uh making a living and so you find a kind of a really interesting I suppose you could say ethical quandary in the speed with which a city grows because there is a you know you could almost in homage to the article I just cited you could probably cite on a graph somewhere you know burglary rates versus speed of architectural construction and you could argue that you know there's a the morals or the the sense of needing to protect oneself haven't caught up yet so those are the theories but but um again I'm saying that based on having read about burglary rates in China but that those those really explanations that I understood uh thank you so to build on some of the previous questions uh I mean whether it's construction of architecture or the anatomy of keys for lockpicking or um how we set up our secure digital information what it sounds like is that teaching others to think like burglars like hackers sounds like it would be at least go a decent distance in helping people to feel more secure and helping people to um know that they're securing their information and their property effectively so in your based on your experience what do you think the best way to help people think in this matter would be uh regardless of the particular type of security we're talking about well I think I guess there are two ways to answer that I mean one is in the particular and I think that that is literally just look at your house from the point of view of knowing that people who want to break into it might be trying to hide behind the same privacy fence that you use in order not to be seen by your neighbors or the tree that you love outside your bedroom window that has a nice branch that you fantasize about climbing um you know the same kinds of things that you might notice uh you know unlit secondary spaces on the on the side of a house uh the fact that you could maybe crawl up uh a pile of things behind like a wood pile in the backyard and get onto a roof and thus onto a balcony etc um you know just literally and and step by step look at your house differently and start closing down those routes of access um but in the abstract I mean it's a I think it's a more subtle answer in that I think that you because then this is no longer just a question about architecture obviously it's a question about um digital security it's a question about even a creative response to literature or how one might interpret something otherwise and I think that that's by looking at something from unexpected points of view and perhaps even mixing disciplines in order to ask I mean because one of the things that I've always enjoyed about writing about architecture is um you know if a some news comes up uh you know well in the material sciences where some new substances have been invented the question is not uh you know do I do I fully understand the the the chemistry behind this object but what would an architect do with it you you ask these sorts of questions or if something comes up in the architecture world you can say well what would a novelist do with this information and you can come up with a quite compelling article about that kind of thing um you know what would a filmmaker do with this this event that just happened in a museum um when you start asking by mixing disciplines I think that you can start combining approaches that's similar to this and is not specifically geared around security um but nonetheless uh you know switches lenses and allows you to see something from a different point of view and I think that that's always a really really important thing to do well that was a terrific um concluding question which is fortunate because we are out of time um thank you Jeff well thanks