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.