Bonnie Burkhardt attended the University of Colorado, graduating with a BS in Applied Mathematics. She and her husband moved to California and worked for General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) Government Systems for a decade. It provided secure communications, electronic surveillance systems, and electronic warfare systems to the Department of Defense (DoD). She was a network protocol engineer and managed a team of engineers to controlling hardware over many types of networks as part of a real-time signal processing system. While there, she received her MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Santa Clara.
In 1989, GTE moved them to Virginia to install their signal processing system and she became a certified operator. She was the primary maintainer of the firmware and developed a calibration compensation software module. She also developed a color graphics tool which drew signals on the screen and paper, and also wrote an Oracle database to track equipment.
After leaving GTE, Ms. Burkhardt maintained a secure e-mail and data transfer system. She then switched to digital signal analysis (digital signal forensics), developing software tools, techniques, and training on analyzing signals intercepted by the DoD. Ms. Burkhardt has a Top Secret security clearance with a current SSBI and polygraph. She was a certified system administrator for a government computer network and did configuration management of the software installed.
In 2007, Ms. Burkhardt founded Blue Ridge Software Consulting, where she is the President and Senior Engineer. She created Bit Buster Graphics, which is an offline signal processing tool analyzing weapons signals. Ms. Burkhardt worked as a signals analyst to developed new techniques using these tools. She wrote class curriculum and taught classes training the military on how to analyze weapons signals. Her software has been delivered to over 40 sites worldwide. She has presented several signal analysis papers at national and international Telemetry, Ephemerous, and Beacon Analysis Community (TEBAC) conferences. She is now working for Verite as an Intelligence Analyst.
Ms. Burkhardt used her knowledge of privacy and interception laws to provide expert witness support to several attorneys. With two cases she wrote amicus briefs as a pro se litigant, arguing for Fourth Amendment rights. The briefs were submitted to the Appellate Court of Virginia in March of 2020. They formed the basis for her book, “Manufacturing Criminals – Fourth Amendment Decay in the Electronic Age.” This book was ranked in the Top-10 best selling Kindle books for civil rights law.