Bradley Manning and "hacker madness" scare tactic

The prosecution claimed that using wget was an unauthorized access under the cfaa because, direct quote I wrote down, Manning was: "only allowed to view one document at a time using a web browser."

To emphasize how scary hackerish wget was, they said that someone: "could not see wget from five feet away. It is a command-line program...it can run in the background."

To talk about how Manning was clearly a hacker, they explained how he:

* "used wget to create functionality that did not exist";

* "had to program wget—wget did not have a GUI, therefore it was not as simple as double-clicking"

* "had to research how to program wget" (by which they meant forensic evidence that he had consulted the wget man page!!)

They also mentioned that there was forensic evidence he had searched google for "computer programming".

That's just wget. In addition, they claimed that writing a VBA macro in Excel to bulk download contact info from Outlook was also a CFAA violation, because Outlook didn't offer a mass export function, so writing a VBA macro (in another part of the Office suite!) was a CFAA violation.

Yeah, scary stuff. Manning was convicted of the CFAA charge by the judge.

"The government says that Bradley Manning used the automated downloading program Wget to retrieve hundreds of thousands of State Department cables from the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and that use of Wget alone constitutes exceeding his authorized access to data, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act."

...

"The Government has not introduced any evidence to suggest that PFC Manning was not permitted to view the cables in question. The Government has not introduced any evidence to suggest that PFC Manning was not permitted to download the cables in question. The Government simply asserts that PFC Manning was not permitted to download them using a certain program, Wget. (Sec. 6)

The Government is simply incorrect in asserting that the use of an unauthorized program to download information automatically converts what would otherwise be authorized access to that information into “exceeding authorized access.” Whether or not PFC Manning used Wget to download the information he had access to is irrelevant; under the language of Section 1030, as well as this Court’s ruling and all legal authorities, PFC Manning could not have exceeded his authorized access because he was authorized to obtain the information he obtained. That is, “exceeds authorized access” is not concerned with the manner in which information to which one has access is downloaded; it is rather concerned with whether the accused was authorized to obtain or alter the information that was obtained or altered. (Sec. 8)"

[1] http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/incompetent-overprose...

EDIT: clarified

Clearly he has never used Wget. It is dark and nefarious and riddled with confusing options that should have sensible default combinations. There's dozens of rules you must follow when using certain parameters, and no simple "turn on all the sane defaults for downloading a website" option. Example from the man page:

           Note that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only
           that single page and its requisites will be downloaded.  Links from
           that page to external documents will not be followed.  Actually, to
           download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist
           on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly
           locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -p:

                   wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>

It started way back when the establishment managed to get society to equate "hacker" with "criminal". Many have argued that we should just accept that as a historical fact, but the propaganda was deliberate and the process that created the propaganda has only gathered strength since.

Witches and heretics, the lot of you.

Which is bonkers - the press routinely have to get handled by the military because they, through ignorance or not caring, will often aid the enemy with information.

From a UK example the BBC during the Falklands exasperated the military because it routinely broadcast information of assistance to the Argentines because they didn't know any better. It isn't the fault of the journalists, it's the fault of the military personnel telling them the information.

The article rightly points out Government's abuse of general ignorance of tech. At the same time it falls into the opposite trap of the "information should be free" brigade.

Manning should've gotten a few years in prison at most, if that. It's quite obvious the government's hand is all over this case to scare future whistleblowers.

Anyway, is there any hope for Manning, now? Can the case still go to the Supreme Court, or is this over?

As a former DoD employee, the hacker paranoia definitely scares me. I used scripts and wrote command line tools for analysis since the tools given were insufficient or just plain sucked. The arguments listed by jrochkind1 could have been applied to me. I certainly have never leaked any information but from the comments below it seems that programming and command line tools themselves are now considered crimes because they can be more powerful although the bulk of normal people are uninterested in using them. Should he be tried and convicted for what he did? Yes (IMO). Should he be tried and convicted because he was what most would consider a power user? No. That's like tacking on charges for a murderer for being too accurate. It deflates the validity of the governments claims, exposes the legal argument to some risk, and creates ridiculous precedent.

There is a scary amount of anti-tech stuff going on now, though I guess that should be expected. Thinking of pg's What People Can't Say essay here, since the computer illiterate are still in charge of most things, while simultaneously the computer literate are now ascendant. I expect it will get worse before it gets better.