Ken Connell

Before I could afford the real thing, I'd clack away on an old typewriter, pretending it was a computer, typing up the "www-dot" addresses I scribbled down from the ends of TV commercials, building a hand-written index of an internet I couldn't reach yet. The real thing came piece-by-piece, with money earned mowing yards and dodging fire ants during long, hot South Georgia summers.

It only booted to a DOS prompt until I could afford Windows 3.1. Dial-up arrived not long after. Back then "the network" was sneakernet (a stack of floppies hand-carried across the room), and my printer was a clunky black-and-white dot-matrix machine chewing through perforated tractor-feed paper. All before USB drives were even a thing.

I later enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 2000, my junior year of high school, and shipped off the summer before my senior year to Basic Combat Training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma (Home of the Field Artillery). The next year brought Advanced Individual Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where I took my final exam on the morning of September 11th, 2001: the same date printed on my AIT certificate, and the day I officially completed initial entry training and was qualified to serve as a soldier.

From there I came up through the enlisted ranks to Staff Sergeant, earned my commission as an officer, and retired as a Major in 2024: more than two decades of service; #TempusFugit. Along the way I deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina for peacekeeping and across the Middle East, including Iraq.

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Out of the University of Georgia in 2009, my first job took me across the Atlantic: a security consultant at Deloitte in London, advising commercial clients throughout Europe on global trade compliance.

Since London: fifteen-plus years of consulting and risk advisory, leading enterprise security work for Fortune 100 and federal clients, from threat intelligence to cloud security to compliance.

These days I work in security, pairing an analyst's mindset with an operator's instinct. Attribution, insider risk, adversarial tradecraft: the old questions, asked of new Agentic AI systems. For me, security isn't just a department. It's a mission.

Off the clock, I'm a maker, a tinkerer, and a dad doing his best to pass the curiosity on, building little electronics projects with my kiddos and watching the same sparks of curiosity ignite in them. AI is becoming part of their everyday world the way the internet became part of mine, so we're learning it together: prompts and patterns one day, soldering irons the next. I'd rather raise builders than browsers; kids who create, build, and delegate, not just swipe and scroll. Trust, but verify, it turns out, is both a parenting principle and a security one. I wrote the longer version of that thought here: Batman Has No Superpowers. That's the Whole Point.