Mark Streetman watched the erection of the Berlin Wall from the safety of his mother’s womb, and happened to be with his mother in Germany when that same Wall fell 27 years later. He got a BS in computer science in Ancient Days when computers were still sacred relics housed in temples and you had to ask a priest to run your program and pray you didn’t make a mistake.
His first grown-up job was at NORAD/Space Command in Colorado Springs, where he worked in the program office that became the GPS system we can’t do without today. The Air Force sent him to such remote places as an Alaskan island where he could almost see Russia from his house and a base in northern Greenland where he watched the summer sun make lazy circles in the sky without ever setting. He then went to Germany, where he was the Director of Information Management for a small Army base by the Dutch border.
After 8 years, he left Europe for grad school in New Orleans, and then became an information security officer at the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s been doing the same thing, plus teaching, at the Government Accountability Office since 2006.