What’s the NIPR?

So I’m looking through my Web stats to see who (if anyone) is visiting, and I notice one of my top 10 visitors is coming from “wcs1-moffett.nipr.mil.”

Someone in the military is visiting my site repeatedly? Let’s find out who — or at least where. Turns out I can’t. “Nipr.mil” is apparently “not a single domain but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities.”

Cool. I think.

So I look a bit deeper and do a search on just “wcs1-moffett.” I found some people associated with it: one David Connelly at “mcchord.af.mil” (Air Force?) in Tacoma, Wash. He posted a message to a site that records where you’re coming from, and it listed him as “wcs1-moffett.nipr.mil.” And Becky Lowe in Utah also came out of that nipr.mil domain. So I can assume that moffett.nipr.mil is out West.

None of this means anything, but I thought it was odd to see 1) that the military has this secret domain it uses to hide servicepeople’s real domains, and 2) that sometimes you can see through it, as with Connelly and Lowe.