Intercepts

The ASD/C3I sweepstakes continued. Chris Mellon a former Senate intell committee staffer for Defense Secretary William Cohen with excellent credentials (great family name and son-in-law of Sen. John Warner) has emerged as the latest possibility to succeed Emmett Paige Jr. Mellon's getting a lot of buzz in Northern Virginia high-tech circles these days as the guy to watch for the job.Paige who has long backed his deputy Tony "The Enforcer" Valletta publicly announced he had put Valletta into play with the new Pentagon management.

If this list keeps growing we'll soon have a field large enough to qualify for a Republican presidential primary. Hey what about Lamar what's-his-name?

~ Year 2000 czar? Appointing a czar stands as a sure-fire way to get visibility funding and backing for a program and some folks in those same Northern Virginia high-tech circles suggest Y2K needs just such a figurehead. Put the right person in the job the reasoning goes and OMB will undo the purse strings. And what better candidate for the job than Bruce McConnell an ASD/C3I wannabe with the moxie and the connections on the Hill to gain the backing needed for the Y2K fix.

Don't forget the Year 3000 problem either - first mentioned in the Wall Street Journal last month. The WSJ discovered - horror of horrors - that Windows 95 can't handle date fields in the Year 3000.

~ North Korean cookies? My stealth antenna site located near the DIA Darth Vader HQ over at Boll-ing Air Force Base Washington D.C. has picked up reports that the spook set has issued a broad warning against surfing sites set up by the North Korean Central News Agency on Web servers in Japan (www.kcna.co.jp). The DIA I hear has determined that anyone accessing that site receives "cookies" that give the North Koreans information about a user's ISP server and connection the next time the user hits the site.

The spooks view the entire North Korean Web operation as an information warfare op although it's hard to get real paranoid about a site that immediately turns off visitors with "news" stories on "Symposiums on greatness of Secretary Kim Jong Il."

~ Some appendix. Want a visible example of what's wrong with the whole budget process? "The Budget of the United States" runs a mere 344 pages - not even enough to get Tom Clancy going. But the appendix to the budget runs 1 214 pages. The Interceptor read them all and guarantees that Clancy is a more compelling read.

~ Maryland passports? That's what IT executives from Maryland may need to attend the 1998 Global IT Conference scheduled to be held in Virginia. Global in this case excludes Maryland IT companies out of fear that they'll poach business from renowned technology hubs such as Chantilly Va. The Interceptor a Maryland resident (and proud of it) but a Virginia worker hopes to obtain a safe-conduct pass from Virginia Governor George Allen to attend the confab.