pentagon

The big fight between the Pentagon and Wikileaks has gotten to the high school breakup stage: the Pentagon wants Wikileaks to put its mix tapes, photos, and t-shirts in a shoebox and mail them back. Also, another rousing argument on Net neutrality, this time with Brian Cooley's uniquely capitalist viewpoint in the mix. Good times.

LAS VEGAS--The United States should decide on rules for attacking other nations' networks in advance of an actual cyberwar, which could include an international agreement not to disable banks and electrical grids, the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency said Thursday.

Michael Hayden, who was the principal deputy director of national intelligence and retired last year, said the rules of engagement for electronic battlefields are still too murky, even after the Defense Department created the U.S. Cyber Command last spring. The new organization is charged with allowing the U.S. armed forces to conduct "full-spectrum … Read more

During the last 24 hours or so, official Washington has erupted with volcanic denunciations of Wikileaks, the document-sharing group that released about 75,000 military reports regarding the war in Afghanistan on Sunday.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called it "alarming" to find so many "top secret documents" publicly available on the Web. (See transcript.)

National security adviser James Jones "strongly" condemned the release in a statement that was reprinted on the U.S. Embassy Web sites for Afghanistan and Turkey.

Over at the Pentagon, spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said it could take weeks … Read more

The Pentagon is looking for a few good flying machines.

The U.S. Department of Defense, in the form of its DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) division, is calling on the research community to create a flying vehicle that can travel both by land and air, lift off without a runway, carry up to four personnel, and handle itself in the battlefield.

With land vehicles vulnerable to ambushes, attacks, and explosives, the objective of the program known as Transformer is to provide soldiers with a vehicle that can travel freely in the air to avoid problems on the ground. Such a vehicle would be used in combat for raids, reconnaissance, insurgency/counterinsurgency, and other types of missions. It would also be deployed to evacuate the wounded and deliver supplies, according to DARPA's solicitation.

Additionally, DARPA is looking for something with VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing), meaning it can lift off like a helicopter requiring no runaway, and reach altitudes as high as 10,000 feet. But to traverse rough road conditions when on the ground, the agency wants the vehicle to handle like an SUV with at least four wheels for stability and heavy-duty suspension. And like the rest of us, it wants a car that's fuel-efficient--able to run for 250 miles on a single tank of gas.… Read more

Bonnie Cha, senior editor for cell phones, joins the show today to fill in for Justin Yu. It's one of the few days Wilson and Jeff aren't worried about losing their jobs for something they shouldn't have said. And no, she is NOT Nicole Lee. What better day to have Ms. Cha on the show than following the weekend that the actual Google phone leaks!

The Google phone has been rumored for the last three or four years, and since the release of Google's Android operating system, the hoopla has died down considerably for an actual Google-branded phone. In typical Google fare, the company has decided on screwing its partners like Verizon and Motorola over by releasing an unsubsidized GSM phone called the Nexus One. No word yet on how much the unit will cost, but we do know that HTC designed the device. And that Google employees got the units over the weekend. Word on the street is that the device runs Android OS 2.1.

The mobile space is where all the spice is these days, and today is no different. News comes out that the venerable institution that is Playboy is jumping into the iPhone app fray with its own app. Because of Steve Jobs' no-porn rule, however, the app won't come with any outright nude pics. It will come with some scantily clad ladies and their interests. Per usual, it's all about the articles, not the pics.

In videogaming news, the Pentagon is buying up 2,200 PlayStation 3s. No, they aren't using it to train soldiers with "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2", while it may be a lot of fun. The military wants to use the gaming consoles to run simulations because the $299 machines can calculate 150 GFLOPS. At The 404, we really have no idea what that means, but it sounds impressive.

Finally, Green Day comes to Rock Band. The Beatles have come already, and while we're generally excited to have one of the best modern bands, we're not really excited to have every dude singing "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" at every single graduation party. This could be a very, very bad thing.

As the World Trade Center and Pentagon were ablaze on September 11, 2001, the U.S. Secret Service's presidential protective detail was informed that a "Korean airliner has been hijacked" en route to San Francisco, prompting already-skittish agents to worry about another wave of terrorist attacks.

That morning and afternoon, Secret Service agents assigned to protect the president and his family found their pagers constantly buzzing with alerts both true and false. There was a false alarm about a car bomb in downtown Washington, D.C., a report of "two Arab males detained" after asking … Read more

Don't count out the Airborne Laser just yet. Just don't count on it as part of the U.S. missile defense system anytime soon, or in any significant role.

Boeing on Friday said that along with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, it has begun flight tests with the entire chemical laser weapon system--the high-energy laser itself, along with the beam control/fire control apparatus--integrated aboard the ABL aircraft, a modified 747-400F.

The plane completed a functional check flight Tuesday and is on track for further aerial tests, including a missile-intercept demonstration later in 2009, according to the … Read more

When Americans are wounded in Afghanistan or Iraq, no expense is spared to save their lives. But once they're home, if they have suffered an amputation of their arm, they usually end up wearing an artificial limb that hasn't changed much since World War II.

In all the wonders of modern medicine, building a robotic arm with a fully functioning hand has not been remotely possible.

But as 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reports, that is starting to change. One remarkable leap in technology is called the DEKA arm and it's just one of the breakthroughs in … Read more

The Pentagon spent more than $100 million in the past six months cleaning up after Internet attacks and network issues, military leaders said on Tuesday.

"The important thing is that we recognize that we are under assault from the least sophisticated--what I would say the bored teenager--all the way up to the sophisticated nation-state, with some petty criminal elements sandwiched in between," Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters at a cyberspace conference in Omaha, Neb., as reported by CBS News.

Neither he nor Army Brigadier Gen. John Davis, deputy commander for … Read more