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Well, sort of. In the Manning case, the government argued that wget was unauthorized on government-owned client machines. Their argument in that case wouldn't apply to the public's use of wget to send requests to government-owned servers.

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Then we need a scan of all government machines to see if there was a precedent of it being installed across many thousands of machines to suggest that this was not an actual individual breach of policy. and show that the government was remiss in its ability to enforce the policy at all.

Government information security and technology people, in my experience, are not necessarily forgiving or understanding in any way. And I mean "understanding" in both senses of that word. They neither care to understand your needs nor necessarily understand much about technology. I see so much extra work done just because the security person in charge of writing a procedure had no understanding of what the phrase "volatile memory" means. And that's just one instance from my work; I wish I could share more but it all makes me sad.

All this is a very long way of saying that some of these people may not have even understood what wget is used for, or believed it was unauthorized for use even though it is a standard tool.

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