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Comment by runlevel1 | Hacker News Reader

In the Chelsea Manning trial, the prosecution characterized `wget` as a nefarious hacking tool.[^1]

In 2009, Boston College police used a suspect's use of Linux and the command line in a warrant application on the basis that it was a sign of possible criminal activity.[^1]

I don't expect law enforcement to be experts, but can you at least ask your local IT guy to sanity check your work first?

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/bradley-manning-and-the...

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>I don't expect law enforcement to be experts, but can you at least ask your local IT guy to sanity check your work first?

The HN crowd probably wildly overestimates the knowledge of the "average" IT guy, especially the kind working for local government.

Sanity has absolutely nothing to do with it. What will be presented at trial is whatever they think they can get away with. Whether wget is a hacking tool or not has no bearing on the matter. This is rhetoric, not a math proof.

When hunting for probable cause this is a feature not a bug.

It may not be inaccurate to characterize wget or curl as tools that could be used to perform nefarious acts of hacking. After all, the command-line options offer wide latitude to twiddle parameters and craft requests far beyond the type that would pass a browser's sanity checks. In fact, I could see where you could make the same argument about popping open the Developer Tools console in a browser.

Plenty of people use wget in a mundane fashion where they may want to automate or test stuff that is in no way illicit hacking, but likewise, malicious threat actors can have a field day with it. It's essentially a morally neutral tool with possibilities.

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