Actually curl doesn’t have crawler features. Wget does, and is ubiquitous because it’s installed with the base system on most Linux distributions.
They don’t actually say Snowden used wget, they say Manning did. But I agree the tech illiteracy makes this painful to read. Ending the second paragraph “what officials cannot explain is why the presence of such software in a highly classified system was not an obvious tip-off to unauthorized activity.” Come on! But later on, the article is interesting in perhaps shedding a bit more light on NSA security culture, describing it as uncompartmented, and again we get how Snowden benefited from a slow rollout of internal monitoring.
