Forever Hacked

Proving that once a document appears on the Internet, it will always be on the Internet, at least a half-dozen web sites have posted copies of the Web pages with which hackers replaced the CIA and Department of Justice home pages last year.

In August, hackers tapped into the Department of Justice web server and replaced its home page with a pornographic and racist page called the "US Department of Injustice." Though the Justice Department quickly shut down their site, several web surfers copied the document before the department could get to it and have mirrored, or posted, the hackers' pages on their own web sites, "for posterity's sake," as one site owner put it.

A month later, when the CIA's home page was replaced with a page called "The Central Stupidity Agency" by a hacker or group of hackers claiming to be a Swedish group called "Power Through Resistance," intrepid web surfers again copied the page and mirrored it.

One site owner who mirrored the CIA page on his site said in an e-mail message that his copy was looked at 50,000 times the first day it was up, including by the CIA, who "looked at it every 10-15 minutes," he said.