When Frederick Deese was tapped by the National Security Agency to become a cryptologist, he didn’t even own a computer. A kid from small-town Alabama, Deese grew up struggling with an undiagnosed learning disability that made school challenging and test-taking feel impossible. He enlisted in the Navy, assigned to deck crew members because of his low Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery scores, but he quickly stood out as a leader and was promoted to missile tech. In 2001, before his second stint in the military, Deese’s wife helped him identify his dyslexia. This time, his ASVAB results returned one of the highest scores available, earning him a spot in the Navy’s cryptology program, where he was tasked with hacking and intrusion detection for the United States government. “I had never touched a laptop,” Deese says. “I didn’t know how to type.” Working in “theater,” meaning in a conflict or war zone, taught Deese how to detect patterns. Gathering disparate data from satellites, moving vehicles and a target’s text messages, voice recordings and behaviors, Deese became an expert at anomaly identification and pattern recognition. One year into the cryptology program, he was named a senior solutions architect for U.S. Cyber Command within the NSA. Deese continued to hone his ability to design algorithms and data-based frameworks, holding a Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information security clearance—the highest security clearance for classified national security information. In 2004, he exited his military career in favor of the government contracting space and found Visual Connections, an information technology consulting firm. Integrity in Technology The very skills that helped Deese detect threats to national security now help him prevent fraud, waste and abuse. Applying his ability to develop analytic models that identify anomalies within datasets, Deese now leads complex commercial and government IT projects for the