I've been interested in computer security ever since my dad spent a week piecing back together a deleted file on my mom's computer. If deleted files are still around, what other ideas did I have about computers that weren't right?

I ran an Albuquerque BBS (like a web forum, but before the Internet) called "Andra" in high school, and picked out my hacker name: zephyr. I was involved in some minor tinkering around with very early networks as zephyr, and worked with a friend to set up a system that would allow people in Albuquerque to send messages all over the world with just a computer and a modem. That same friend and I, with two other people from our high school, won the first Supercomputing Challenge, run by LANL and Sandia.

In college I learned about PGP encryption, how to send emails anonymously on the Internet, and got involved with online protests against the "Communications Decency Act"--a law which would have made it a crime to provide Internet access to a 19-year-old sending an email to his 16-year-old girlfriend.

After school I worked briefly for LANL, and left just before Wen Ho Lee and the Case of the Missing Hard Drives. I moved to Seattle and worked as the chief architect for FreeInternet.com, which was briefly the second-largest Internet provider in the USA. I then went to Watchguard Technologies, and wrote firewall software for medium-sized companies.

While in Seattle I became involved with a worldwide cryptography and anonymity organization called the "cypherpunks". I organized two protest marches against the illegal jailing of a Russian computer hacker named "Dmitry Sklyarov", who was later released and allowed to go back home to his wife and son.

When I came back to LANL in 2005, my experience made me a good candidate to deal with network computer security. I now run the white hat (good guy hacker) site dirtbags.net, and run Capture The Flag contests around the country to train computer security professionals.

Neale Pickett