All Out

Let me be a little vulnerable on here for a second, or a few minutes if you will.

I know there’s plenty of posts that will cover politics and personal events and challenges on here, and just as many noting that they don’t belong in a “professional” networking and “news” site.

However, I feel that all three here, work, life and politics of the day need to be the subject of this post, and I would beg your interest to follow along a little bit on this story.

I’ve been workshopping what I want to say/type here for the better part of a week, and feel, while I wanted to share this on Tuesday, each subsequent day adds more to cover and reason with in order to show to you, my dear reader, why much of all of what’s going on is not what it seems.

When I get to introducing myself nowadays, either professionally at work to new coworkers, that first “about me” slide for a talk or presentation, or even socially to catch people up on who I am and why am I here (and in the area where I live, “what I do”), I feel a little bashful doing so.

Why would this be the case?

First, I really don’t toot my own proverbial horn. While I know what my personal career path has been, I know others have theirs, and everybody has their choice and route. But… some of those stops along the way are places folks easily could have laid down a multi-year career, where mine were shorter terms either by choice or circumstance.

However, the reason for this post overall, given all that has transpired in the news the past few days in the United States, and especially the politics involved, it was time to come clean – in a very personal way. This isn’t meant to be a selfish post, nor to brag about what my life has afforded me, but a way to demonstrate the absolute opposite of what has been sucking the air out of the room in the current news cycle.

That said, if I tried to enumerate each and every action taken since January 20th, Inauguration Day, this would be much longer that what I had planned when I first decided to start typing this, because, by any accounts would have ended up as a novel rather than a short story as intended.

First, for the uninitiated about me, I tend to show up at places either just before or managed to be present during a major event or incident. My first experience in such a situation was joining Constellation Energy just before the Northeast Blackout and Hurricane Isabel, learning quite a bit on continuity of operations (COOP) and disaster recovery (DR) in a few short months.

As we know, good things come in threes, as do bad things it seems, and we literally got to ensure our DR and COOP a few months after the hurricane, through quarterly drilling for our trading floor, when the bathrooms backed up and, well, shit literally hit the fan in modern parlance, and that floor, a bulk of our revenue, stayed in our off-site facility without skipping a beat for additional weeks while things were repaired.

Some folks will have my notoriety built on the tale I told for Darknet Diaries regarding the hack by China of the World Bank systems. While Jack and crew told a good tale, there were items that led up to and occurred after, some related, some not, that were as about as bad, if not by scale, but by the amount of work required to get to a deeper understanding of what went on.

Many probably would “peace out” by this point in their careers, unless they lived on events like this as a motivator in their careers, questioning if it was their fault, or just had the kind of luck that would not do an individual very well for Vegas table games. For me, it’s all a learning experience.

Regardless of all this preceding experience, my life definitely took a different turn when I started on the path as a public servant. Whatever has been said recently by those in power the past two weeks criticizing those employees, their motivations, quality of work, and impact to citizens, residents and visitors to the United States is entirely wrong and misguided, and here’s why.

In between my time at Constellation and Mandiant, I did my first government adjacent role as a contractor to the General Services Administration (GSA) performing system reviews for Federal Information Security Management Act compliance. My father had been a Federal employee for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working on several projects, including investigations of lab fraud and water quality standards. I had not intended to work for the government, but along with my grandfather, his brothers, one of who perished in World War II on a bombing run in the Pacific whose crew marker is in Arlington National Cemetery, if figured it may be predestined to serve.

While that role and exposure to government at the Federal level wasn’t ideal, it didn’t blunt the desire to give back to the country. But given an opportunity to work at my alma-mater through CERT/CC at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to support a new program attempting to have defense industrial base partners, it was hard to pass up, especially the challenge of working in a classified environment and improve the sharing and analysis of cyber intrusion and incident data. SEI was a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) which is contracted by the government to provide skills and capabilities that aren’t present in the regular Federal workforce or normal contractors over a longer term.

This was my first time working directly with the intelligence community and Federal and Defense Department law enforcement, including our agency liaisons and through the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF). This group included representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and I had the opportunity to collaborate with them during Operation Aurora, quickly triaging the scope and impact of this campaign. I worked on revising the Incident Object Description Exchange Format (IODEF) to put it into applied operational use to collect and model attackers, their indicators of compromise (IOC) and relations between threat actors.

When an opportunity arose to transition from the FFRDC role to a full Federal civil servant at the Department of the Interior (DOI), I couldn’t pass it up. I joined DOI in early 2010 as the Chief Information Security Architect for the agency, working across all the bureaus and offices that make up this cabinet-level agency. This included kicking off their mobile device and security program, aligning vulnerability scanning processes, and other projects that supported the missions of the department.

In 2014 I was offered an opportunity by my leadership to apply for and participate in the President’s Management Council Inter-Agency Rotation Fellowship program. This was an alternative, intensive leadership development program for high performing senior career employees that provided opportunities to develop senior executive service (SES) executive core qualifications (ECQs). While it was not my first choice of three, the original of which was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but ended up with my second choice as a very un-sexy titled role as a Cybersecurity Analyst with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the Executive Office of the President (EOP).

From the start of that six-month rotation to the end was probably the most intensive and busy part of my nearly 30 year professional career. Again, being in the wrong place at the right time, I educated the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer (OFCIO) on Heartbleed, including a crash course in how open source projects are run and governed, the Federal Open Source Policy, managed the Open Data Initiative program, was the primary legislative reviewer for all cybersecurity legislation from Congress that Summer, and was one of the co-founders of the United States Digital Service (USDS) during the pre-launch period.

I left the rotation program with an unforgettable experience, new perspectives on how our government works, and new vigor on what I wanted to do with my career and the impact I wanted to have. While I returned to my home agency, asking to see when the vacant Chief Technology Officer role was to be filled, or offer starting up a Digital Service Office within the department, ultimately it was not the right time for the agency given a recent leadership change in the CIOs office there. No ill will was to be had, as the newly promoted CIO was somebody I had worked closely with before, including an in-depth workforce analysis to determine how to rearchitect the network to provide reliable and fast service to everywhere the department operates, who later came to our departure party before leaving to work for The Walt Disney Company.

While my time at Disney was short due to a number of reasons, none of it was due to my work, performance or the role itself, but rather, I didn’t like Los Angeles and my spouse was battling a chronic disease, and the lifestyle we could afford to have was not conducive for long term success. However, it did inspire me to return to Federal service, this time back at the United States Department of the Treasury, primarily leading the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program across the agency. This was the second go-around for this type of activity, as an initial demonstrative program was also an activity I helped manage at Interior in 2012.

For that program at Treasury, I learned an immense amount about how to work across the agency offices and bureaus, as well as across other agencies, including the program sponsors, the Department of Homeland Security and GSA, and other agencies who were part of our contract cohort group, including the United States Postal Service (USPS), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NASA, and the Social Security Administration (SSA).

I advocated on behalf of my agency based on our needs within the department to DHS and GSA, but also collaborated with our group partner agencies to ensure that services delivered to our agencies met our needs, of which the initial CDM program did not properly address. It was necessary to speak up when we felt the program was not properly addressing the technical and operational needs of the agency missions. I became known for being very open and honest about those needs within DHS and GSA, because as a civil servant, I knew that our agencies had multiple impacts to the effective and efficient delivery of citizen services to the public, a perspective I felt was not on the forefront with ?DHS program leads and architects.

In my final role as a public servant, I was given the opportunity to become the Deputy Chief Information Officer and Chief Enterprise Architect for the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in 2017. Becoming part of the oversight and integrity community for this agency, which was the largest office of this type in the Federal government, was inspiring and my favorite role as a public servant. It only got better when I was able to backfill the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role when our prior government lead departed, and seeing that our mission still needed to be kept on schedule and on track in light of complications from a Federal government shutdown due to a budget lapse. I was dual hatted at the DCIO and CTO for several months during that time, but managed to lead two teams of Federal employees and contractors numbering above one hundred individuals.

During this time, we led the acquisition of ServiceNow, which required careful negotiations with HHS as a whole, who viewed our office as the most innovative one within the entire agency, a rarity for a component typically viewed as reserved and conservative. These teams won multiple awards for their work, managed to deliver important applications and services to our staff and partners, integrated external systems with other law enforcement agencies, and supported the development and implementation of data analysis services that saved multiple lives form drug overdoses and assisted in uncovering malfeasance, waste, fraud and abuse of immigration programs that HHS supported through grants to external parties.

In each case above, I felt that between my times in the private sector and public sector, my colleagues who were civil servants were some of the most dedicated and innovative individuals I ever had to change to work with. For the vast majority of those individuals, the mission drove their work and dedication to end goals, ensuring we could deliver on promises and entitlements that are due citizens and public within the United States and partner organizations, including international and inter-agency support roles.

While this is a very long story, this only scratches the surface. There were also plenty of other projects and programs that were just as important, but to keep this, again, from turning into a novel, they have been left out, including navigating the government-wide review, markup and agency approval process for FISMA 2014, a law that was approved with personal and critical changes and markup that I provided that original authors left out that were necessary to ensure involvement of important components of agencies.

So, the last week of constant attack on civil servants, agencies and the services they provide and missions they serve is very ill-informed and wholly incorrect. These folks work for rates much less than what the private sector could pay, with benefits that often require much more contributions to bear than private sector employees, but see the mission as more important. They stay in the government roles much longer than many in the private sector would because of this tie to the mission, not out of lack of skills or abilities to succeed in the private sector or elsewhere. They are not the folks who are the drag on government efficiency.

These same employees, due to the inability of Congress to regularly deliver a predictable budget and funding requires creative thinking and methods to keep mission services delivered and systems operating. Folks in many of these roles manage to spin gold from spit and bailing wire, coming up with unique and innovative solutions to work around this common problem of funding. When this happens again and again, it can be demotivating, but not becoming the demagogues that some people tend to label them as.

Civil servants are hard workers. They come from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, educational backgrounds, socio-economic status that provide the kind of diversity that make the services and capabilities they provide informed by those characteristics. It makes government services better, stronger and more reliable as well as adaptable for the populations they serve. I’d hire a former Fed over many individuals who only ever worked in the private sector due to that experience and dedication to important missions.

But one of the key things here, my own vulnerability here noted when this started, was the fact that this current administration chooses to see diversity, inclusivity, and equality as a weakness, but in actuality, it’s the greatest strength. They have turned their ire on the Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ+) community as well, seeing transgender individuals as unworthy to serve the public and even exist in our society and culture. Saying they don’t have the skills, fortitude and capability to meaningfully participate not only in the military, public service or society as a whole.

But guess what?

You read this story to here… and here’s the twist.

I’m transgender.

I’m worthy of contributing to this great country, providing support and leadership in the highest pressure roles, the most critical of tasks and missions, and deliver important services to our public and citizens. So are many others.

We are not evil, we are not deficient, we are not impaired.

We just want to contribute. We want to help. We want to serve.

You come at them, my brothers, my sisters, my theys and thems – you’re gonna have to come for me, and I damn well know you don’t hold a candle to my skills, abilities and achievements.

There’s plenty of others like me out there who are just as awesome.

This administration is evil, harmful, and is illegally operating within government agencies, trying to ruin our country and society. Resist, fight back, do the right thing. Don’t suffer in silence, raise your voice, be visible, be heard and act.

The USDS I helped launch should not be a tool of the rich and elite to dismantle our government.

Our Treasury Department should not be pillaged by attacking the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s operations. They are our Federal “general ledger” and ensure we pay our bills, support our global grant making, and ensure our financial obligations are met.

The other agencies under attack by this new administration are being done illegally. We have FISMA in place and other laws to ensure that Federal services are delivered and operations performed safely and securely. Subverting this is an afront to all that work and trust the public and citizens have put in the government.

Don’t let this happen anymore. We are better than this.

Don’t let the hard work of civil servants, servants to our country, be trashed and dismantled due to the ego and largess of the worst people in the world.

I love this country, and I’m sure you do too, and I don’t want it to fail

RESIST.

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