The need for self-imposed morality

I spend a lot of time thinking about internet security, what with coursework that deals with it and my own nearly constant use of the internet for school, business, and recreation. Many of the nasty things that people do on the internet have exact analogs in the real world; for example, stealing someone’s credit card information and buying stuff with it isn’t too different from stealing someone’s wallet and buying stuff with the cards in it. Other things have analogs that are far more strained; for example, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is similar to a sit-in, but the absence of the human presence makes it more like a prank or vandalism and less like a significant political statement.

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