Howdy from the Team: Celeste Bilby

I've been asked to tell a little bit about myself to the class as well, although I feel a little intimidated, being in such exalted company. I was born and raised a mormon army brat, and spent most of my growing years in west Germany. My father retired in Virginia, and I graduated high school here, class of 1993. These days, I'm a software tester for AOL (sorry about the membership wars, Trent) but in my slave days, I was a contractor for the intel community. I've worked with the CIA, NRO and NIMA, primarily, writing risk assessments and training materials for the Directorate of Administration, providing technical field support and software testing for the Direcorate of Operations, and with some network engineering and graphics work to boot. It's been a little over two years, but my most recent assignment was with the Near East and South Asia division of the DO.

I was writing risk assessments and helping run a course in Analytical Risk Management over at the DA when Kasi was finally captured, and was still there when some poor nut decided to run the main gates at CIA headquarters and finally come to a stop on the front steps of the old Headquarters building. It was here that I developed a passionate hatred for the standard security philosophy in government, that "it takes an incident." Hardly surprising, given that I was being paid to teach security professionals to stop thinking like that... I didn't have much luck, but I came away with some very clear ideas on what I thought were some of the intel community's weakest points.

Given my inability to keep my mouth shut for political purposes, I had to move to a commercial job, but that made it possible for me to discover Instapundit, start lurking in the comments of Little Green Footballs, and eventually start a weblog of my own. I was mighty flattered when Joe Katzman invited me to join up with Winds of Change.