> about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action In general distance from a victim shie

> about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action In general distance from a victim shields people from experiencing the impact of their actions. My late grandfather was an artillerist on the Soviet side in World War 2: he talked about how soldiers would vomit, fall ill, and cry after visibly killing enemy soldiers for the first time with short-range handheld arms (i.e., grenades, rifles, submachine guns, bayonets, or pistols). Yet, himself, when shelling remote positions with full understanding the shells -- in addition to killing much larger groups of enemy soldiers than bullets -- may have also killed civilians (which for most of the war generally meant Soviet or other allied civilians). This isn't about moral rationalization -- obviously resisting Nazis and winning World War II was a good thing -- but emotional reaction. To get back on topic, what I think happens here isn't someone thinking that somehow committing one crime electronically vs. physically is less severe; it's that one's disgust with what they're doing is less, which makes a various rationalizations (whether correct or incorrect) for one's actions easier to accept. > I don't know what you do about the guy who fed his admin credentials to Anonymous to help them deface a newspaper. I am trying to draw a comparison here with someone either letting an unauthorized person enter the printing rooms of a newspaper (and as a result something other than a newspaper was printed and delivered). Yet that isn't quite right: someone with physical access to printing room of a newspaper could have done even greater damage. Another comparison could be with a newspaper boy agreeing to deliver a sarcastic parody of a paper in place of the actual paper. Yet that too isn't quite right, as it's far easier for the newspaper to recover promptly, and the damage is localized. All of those things are hard to answer.