Intercepts

* Admirals adrift. When Spawar formally took over San Diego NRAD/NCCOSC last month Adm. George Wagner wanted the new organization's name applied to everything - including the former .nosc.navy.mil domain name. Corporate identity is important but the newly renamed .spawar.navy.mil domain left a lot of e-mail adrift including a whole bunch of admirals using a system established by N6 Vice Adm. Walt Cebrowski. The problem: The Navy operates numerous old-fangled routers which have to be manually reprogrammed from the "nosc" to "spawar" identifier.

Until that task is complete look for a lot of Navy e-mail - including the special admirals list - to end up in limbo. And hardly anyone left in the Navy knows Morse code.

* Power play? My Crystal City Va. antenna site has picked up strong signals that Capt. George Allison head of NCTC recently sent out a message (before the Spawar domain snafu) announcing that his command was now in charge of all Navy base-level IT infrastructure projects. The message brought a quick and heated response from Adm. Archie Clemins' CINCPACFLT widget and comm staffers who have developed their own infrastructure plans under the IT-21 project. The NCTC message also seems to run into the Naval Virtual Intranet project under study by Rear Adm. John Gauss out of the N6 shop.

* High-test DMS. NSA likes its networks to offer users a bit more security than that afforded to your average AOL user or for that matter the average DOD user and it just tapped Wang to provide a DMS Guard product that operates at the secret level and potentially into super-secret enclaves according to George Weber the company's veep for secure systems. "We ran every known test the NSA can exercise...and this is impenetrable to hackers." Weber added that he believes Wang also has a "strong growth path" with the new product which eventually will lead to its use as a network management tool for secret networks.

* Mission-critical paper. The conference report on the 1998 Defense authorization bill mandates using copy paper by 2004 that contains at least 50 percent post-consumer recycled paper unless the secretary of Defense determines that such paper "does not meet performance standards." This raises the question of not only what constitutes "performance standards" for copy paper but also the state of DOD in 2004 when the secretary can take the time to pay attention to copy paper performance. Peace is wonderful.

* On the road again. Look for the familiar Interceptor mobile unit at Milcom '97 in Monterey Calif. this week where I will be covering keynote speeches by Adm. Clemins and Gen. Howell Estes triple-hatted as CINCSPACE CINCNORAD and COMAFSPC. The Navy which lately never misses a chance to push its IT program is slated to have the USS Coronado in Monterey for Milcom making it the largest exhibit at the conference and show.