It's a strange time to be living in America. It is said that those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. Yet very few people seem to realize that there are some uncomfortably close parallels between present-day America and 1930's Germany around the time of the collapse of the Weimar republic. Alas, these few are not in government, and so the "democratic" nation of the United States of America is under attack not from without (as the architects of the current crisis would have us believe) but from within.

There are many who accuse Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden of treachery. Predictably the media attention has been focused on the charges rather than the information disclosed. This is a smoke screen.

It seems incontrovertible that among the materials Manning released to Wikileaks there is evidence of war crimes and cover-ups (along with the usual diplomatic double dealings that reveal the everyday duplicity of American foreign policy). So here's a question.

How was Manning supposed to get action on these crimes? It's not sensible to suggest he should have gone through channels, since the material he was concerned about revealed precisely that the channels were covering their asses for dear life. I am sure that people must have many ideas of different ways to blow the whistle, and I am interested in whether he had any practical alternative. If you think he should have just kept quiet then shame on you.

How does this relate back to pre-war Berlin? Well, I look around each time I leave the United States and I see a huge army of trained goons (often, with all due respect, not the brightest individuals you would expect to meet in a day's march) prepared to put people to almost any inconvenience to negate a threat smaller than the risk of crossing the road. I see a country where large areas of one of the largest cities can be confined to their homes by law enforcement officers, who appear to feel that they have the right to impose terror on anyone they meet. I see a government that is doing everything it can to erode the freedoms and civil liberties enshrined in a constitution that is rapidly being made a laughing stock by the courts. I see a Congress the majority of whose members appear to be far more interested in lining their own pockets and assuring their present and future comfort than in the welfare of those they allegedly represent.

In these circumstances I read that one of the charges of which Manning was convicted involved the use of a program called wget. It's a way to retrieve content from Internet web servers without using a browser, it comes with most Linux distributions and can be freely obtained for almost any operating system. I frequently use wget myself, as do many of my technical peers in the web community. Here's a chilling little quote from a report on the case.

Manning’s lawyers asked the judge, Colonel Denise Lind, to dismiss the charge, saying that their client hadn’t stolen passwords or bypassed digital firewalls to access the documents and thus had not committed computer fraud. But Lind declined to throw out the charge.

So I now find myself as a regular user of a program whose use can (in my opinion arbitrarily) be prosecuted as computer fraud—even if it were freely available to anyone with a web browser. I have taught security classes for the last fifteen years, and clearly possess the means to subvert network protections should I choose (which I don't). And in this climate I am starting to wonder “when will they come for me?”

It's the people's responsibility to keep the government honest. By neglecting that duty we have created a government where even the well-intentioned can make little progress. The body politic has been neglected so long that its cancer is metastasizing. If we don't get our scalpels out and start cutting, pretty soon there will be nothing left worth saving.