I’ve been bingewatching this, and they make references to her past, I guess as a hacker, and in one episode she says “That’s how they caught me” or somesuch.
So what’s the deal, did they ever fill in the blanks on this, like how an ex-hacker comes to get FBI clearance?
Yeah, she was a kid hacker so good the FBI offered her a job instead of criminal prosecution when she was caught screwing around in one of their databases.
Well, in real life, the FBI is starting to admit that the best hackers available (the very people they want to hire) tend to use weed, and they’re starting to look the other way.
So, it’s not totally implausible that they’d hire a Garcia.
There was one episode in the third or fourth season (I think) where she talked about how, after having had a rough life as a kid, she finally decided to make something of herself and “learned [computer] code” and got recruited. IIRC, this was around Halloween of 2006.
Sorry I can’t be more specific.
I know she said her parents were hippies.