One of the talks I went to today was by the "Tamper Indicating Devices" people at the lab. TIDs are physical seals that are placed on some container to prevent you from getting inside without the owner knowing you've been there (think: glorified plastic cable-tie).

We use TIDs a lot in the safeguards industry, mostly to ensure that the host country isn't messing with our unattended monitoring equipment in our absence. Anyway, one of the jobs of the LANL TID people is to test how reliable these devices are. And they do this by attempting to bypass them using any and all means available.

Usually, getting past a TID involves breaking something that can't be fixed [easily]. The TID squad includes at least one guy who used to work at an auto body repair place, because they can make damaged metal look shiny and new. It also includes a guy formerly from the model train community, because they can make wood look like metal, dress material to look like something it's not, etc. Their work is totally sweet. They showed us some really fancy TIDs that they had bypassed and you couldn't tell they were broken at all. I was very impressed.

...and the guy from the auto shop sorta looked like, ya know, if you needed a stereo... he could hook you up.