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From: wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin)
Newsgroups: misc.security
Subject: Re:  Same Key?
Message-ID: <9012120442.AA12888@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 21 Nov 90 16:41:35 GMT
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For what it's worth, just this past weekend (18 Nov 90), the "Fight Back"
consumer program hosted by David Horowitz, which I think is a nationally-
syndicated TV show, had a segment on locks being keyed alike. Unfortunately,
I missed the first minute or so of the segment, but it appeared that a
viewer had sent in a letter reporting that all (or a large number) of the
door locks for sale at a hardware store in her area had the same key.

Horowitz interviewed a lock manufacturer, who stated that there were about
6000 possible key combinations on standard door locks, and that they
tried to spread the duplicates out geographically, with one shipment to
a single dealer not having any duplicates (or at least minimizing the
number of duplicates). Duplicates were supposed to be sent to disparate
areas of the country, like New York versus San Francisco. The situation
reported by the viewer was a failure of this policy, of course -- possibly
an order for locks keyed alike had gotten mispackaged into the regular
retail-sales output.

Horowitz suggested that people purchasing door locks check out the other
identical items in the store, and see if the one lock's key will work a
different lock. If these things are in sealed packages, though, I don't
see how this would be possible. I would be more wary of a situation
where a builder, say, creating a subdivision, bought a truckload of locks
from a single vendor to put on the doors of those houses. If *he* got a
keyed-alike batch, now *that* would be an interesting mess...! If all
the locks on the shelf at a K-Mart were keyed alike, and I bought one,
that really isn't much of a risk -- who would know that the lock now on
my door was one of *those* locks? My neighbors' locks would have come
from dozens of other sources, and it would be unlikely that one of them
would have bought the same kind of lock at the same K-Mart during that
same time period, after all...

This program is usually repeated later in the viewing year, so you may
well be able to catch this segment on a show aired this coming spring,
if it is carried in your area.

Regards, Will Martin

PS -- Hmm... Do subdivision builders master-key their houses' locks so
they can get in to all the houses with just the one master key? Or
aren't the houses locked before they are sold? [I always lived in old
city houses and know nothing of subdivisions...] WM