From Lego Robotics to Privacy

From the beginning

This goes back a while. In third grade a bunch of after-school clubs showed up, open to every student, and the obvious pick was Lego Robotics. It was my first taste of anything techy. We’d only just started typing on the little public school iPads. Even at that age the club taught us the basics of giving computers instructions: simple algorithms, working around obstacles, teamwork. The repetition was reassuring. We knew what to do when the robot crashed into a wall or fell down the stairs. We built the robot together and wrote the conditional instruction sets we’d compete with. I don’t remember the details, but it was the first stepping stone to where I am now.

Skip to sixth grade, when my habit of scheming kicked in. Ideas show up in my head without warning. That’s a very entrepreneurial trait, though most of mine (especially then) were ridiculous. The first one I actually executed was selling little origami pieces to other students. I already had the supplies, they took almost no time to make, and my friends kept asking for them, so the demand was real. As silly as it was, I learned how to operate under the radar, grow a business by word of mouth alone, and manage inventory. (Let me be clear: I was eleven and made a total of $14 before I was shut down.)

High school

Three long years later I started high school with no big plans and signed up for an intro Python class. I was a little disappointed at first, since I’d learned some Java at a two-week summer course. Not much programming happened, just loops, variables and the most basic, repetitive functions you can imagine. Still, I liked it, and I clicked with the instructor, so I kept learning on my own and showed off my odd little programs in class the next day. (Several viruses and truly pointless programs were developed.) The instructor kept pushing me to join a special tech program the school offered, with advanced technical classes and an internship at the end. I wasn’t thrilled about joining a program. Then Covid shut everything down.

Once the vacation feeling wore off and I got bored, I watched videos on Python and tinkered. My first real projects were simple games I played with friends. I was following tutorials, but I picked up more than the class taught. Nothing worth sharing, just projects that barely worked. A few months later I finally got talked into the tech program. The first class was basic robotics and electronics: circuits, then Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to make lights, sounds and motors move, and to blow up LEDs with far too much current.

That’s where I met another instructor who bears responsibility for who I’ve become. The atmosphere was lively, experimental and curious, and everyone dove into whatever they found interesting. A small group I was in built little cars from Raspberry Pi kits and had trouble with the built-in software. Instead of reading instructions on multiple websites, we used our “creative” problem-solving. The worst idea we put into practice was duct-taping a phone to the car with a video call running, and driving it over SSH with a program we wrote ourselves. Many classrooms were invaded by our creation.

Around the same time I tried machine learning on my own. I spent hours on YouTube watching concept videos and tutorials. The hardware I had was less than stellar, so I could only run small models. First was an optical character recognition model that matched the examples I was following. It bored me, so I moved on to object recognition on a GPU. It was another simple project, but I got it running in a few hours on an old office PC with a GTX 1650 jammed into the side. With reasonable accuracy it followed me and things I held in front of the camera. I couldn’t come up with any original ideas I understood well enough to build, so I made one more image classifier. Cat? Dog? Skunk? Let’s just say it didn’t go well.

Where I am now

I studied business administration at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University, and I’m interested in a wide range of things. I’ve gone to events and webinars, finished my own little projects, helped peers with theirs, and consulted for small companies for fun.

Two things came out of all of that.

Offensive OSINT. I find information on people.

Defensive OSINT. I make your information hard to find.

The second one is the job. The glossary entry on OSINT explains the first, and what a privacy broker is explains the second. The stories on the Windows bug and the WordPress class are where I learned to think like the attacker.