Notes from the ducking stool: wget as evidence of guilt at the Manning trial


A moment of outstanding absurdity from the Manning trial: prosecutors inquiring in tones of menace whether a witness is familiar with "wget" — a standard Unix command for fetching a file from the Web ("wget" = "Web get") that many of us use routinely.

The prosecutors are in their early 30s — nominally "digital natives" — and should know better. "Do you know what Wget is?" they interrogate a witness, as if it is malicious spyware and not an everyday command line program. The government is capitalizing on asymmetric tech literacy and the failure of language when old laws are applied to the internet.

Bradley Manning on Trial