The Pentagon

A large five-sided building in Arlington county, Va., near Washington, D.C., that serves as headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, including all three services--Army, Navy, and Air Force. Designed by George Edwin Bergstrom, it was built in 1941-43 to bring under one roof the U.S. War Department offices then housed in widely scattered buildings. On its completion it was the world's largest office building, covering 34 acres (14 hectares; including a 5-acre [2-hectare] central court) and offering 3,700,000 square feet (343,730 square m) of usable floor space for as many as 25,000 persons, military and civilian. Built of structural steel and reinforced concrete with some limestone facing, the structure has five floors, excluding the mezzanine and the basement. The building consists of five concentric pentagons, or "rings," with 10 spokelike corridors connecting the whole. A huge concourse within it provides a shopping centre for Pentagon workers, and beneath this concourse are bus and taxi terminals. Parking areas adjacent to the building can accommodate as many as 10,000 cars, and a heliport for the Pentagon was added in 1956.

The Pentagon papers  contain a history of the U.S. role in Indochina from World War II until May 1968 and that were commissioned in 1967 by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They were turned over (without authorization) to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.
The 47-volume history, consisting of approximately 3,000 pages of narrative and 4,000 pages of appended documents, took 18 months to complete. Ellsberg, who worked on the project, had been an ardent early supporter of the U.S. role in Indochina but, by the project's end, had become seriously opposed to U.S. involvement. He felt compelled to reveal the nature of U.S. participation and leaked major portions of the papers to the press.

On June 13, 1971, The New York Times began publishing a series of articles based on the study, which was classified as "top secret" by the federal government. After the third daily installment appeared in the Times, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained in U.S. District Court a temporary restraining order against further publication of the classified material, contending that further public dissemination of the material would cause "immediate and irreparable harm" to U.S. national-defense interests.

The Times--joined by The Washington Post, which also was in possession of the documents--fought the order through the courts for the next 15 days, during which time publication of the series was suspended. On June 30, 1971, in what is regarded as one of the most significant prior-restraint cases in history, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, freed the newspapers to resume publishing the material. The court held that the government had failed to justify restraint of publication.

The Pentagon Papers revealed that the Harry S. Truman administration gave military aid to France in its colonial war against the communist-led Viet Minh, thus directly involving the United States in Vietnam; that in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam and to undermine the new communist regime of North Vietnam; that President John F. Kennedy transformed the policy of "limited-risk gamble" that he had inherited into a policy of "broad commitment"; that President Lyndon B. Johnson intensified covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning to wage overt war in 1964, a full year before the depth of U.S. involvement was publicly revealed; and that Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 despite the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that it would not cause the North Vietnamese to cease their support of the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam.

The release of the Pentagon Papers stirred nationwide and, indeed, international controversy because it occurred after several years of growing dissent over the legal and moral justification of intensifying U.S. actions in Vietnam. The disclosures and their continued publication despite top-secret classification were embarrassing to the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, who was preparing to seek reelection in 1972. So distressing were these revelations that Nixon authorized unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg, efforts that came to light during the investigation of the Watergate Scandal.

U.S.Military Shaken By Hack Attack

Insight Magazine reported in their May 1998 issue hackers can cripple military as well as civilian computer networks,according to defense officials who witnessed a simulated attack on vital electronic facilities of the U.S. Pacific Command.Using software
easily obtained from hacker sites on the Internet.Experts at the N.S.A said the hackers could have shut down the U.S. electric
power grid and render the control-command elements of the Pacific Command useless with a war game named Eligible
Receiver.

"The attack was actually run in a two week period and the results were frightening."says a defense official involved in the
game.Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon put the best spin he could on the war game."Eligible Receiver was an important
and revealing exercise that taught us that we must be better organized to deal with potential attacks against our computer
systems and information infrastructure."

 The secret exercise began last June after months of preparation by 50 to 75 NSA computer experts who,without warning,targeted computers used by U.S. military forces in the Pacific and in the U.S.The hackers proved that foreign nations can wreak havoc
using programs widely available on the darker regions of the Internet.The hackers broke into unclassified military computers
and also gained access to systems that control the electric power grid for entire United States.If they wanted to they could
have disabled the grid,leaving the entire country in the dark.

Knocking out the electrical power grid throughout the U.S. was just a sideline for the NSA cyberwarriors.Their main target
was the Pacific Command,which directs 100,000 troops who would be called on to deal with wars against North Korea or
China.The hackers foiled almost all efforts to trace them.FBI agents joined the Pentagon,but they located only one of several
NSA groups,a unit based in the U.S.

"It's a very difficult security environment when you go through different hosts(ISP's) and different countries and then pop
up on the doorstep of Keesler Air Force Base in MS,and then go from there into Cincpac",the official says,using the acronym
for the Commander in Chief,Pacific.The bottom line:The Military and other networks were unprepared for the attack."They
just were not security aware.",says the official.Many military computers used the word "password" for their confidential access word.

When the Pentagon was hacked into it later found out  that it wasn't a foreign nation,terrorist at all,but two teenagers in California and one teenager in Israel.This should frighten everyone as Big Brother can't even secure their own systems but wants to increase their surveillance on U.S. Citizens.