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You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
I think you are missing my point. To commit crime you have to have law, the DNA of the internet was always lawlessness and anarchy. It started as a warzone. The fact that meatspace has claimed control and thinks its rules apply - doesn't change the nature of the place. Hackers are not criminals - internet was created to be unrulable - well it was created to be undisruptable, but the two kinda go together. So the burden is on the defender, by default. In the real world you have the whole monopoly of violence thing that says rape is not ok. Internet was designed so that monopoly of violence is impossible. Well the governments figured this one clever trick that if they can put chokepoints and match your digital to physical identity they could break your kneecaps. But still.
I don't accept this framing and it's not clear why anyone should. Everything you do is subject to the laws of the place your body occupies. And there are real meat-space consequences to their actions, whether a hacker just makes a laptop battery overheat or causes a food shortage by spoiling a country's worth of meat. You wish there was some weird magical world where you can do things but those actions have no moral valence, but that is a childish desire.
Yes. And defrosting French freezers is not a crime in North Korea. This is how North Koreans say hello to each other.
No, but deliberately allowing North Koreans to remotely defrost French freezers is an act of war by North Korea against France*, and French nukes work and North Korean ones don't.
* Technically a criminal one, as an attack on the civilian food supply chain.
This would be true for "encouraging", and for some definitions of "allowing", but "allowing" has a lot of grey area. "We thought he deserved a fifth chance!" is a pretty good shield of plausible deniability in too much of the modern west, including France.
That is a French domestic case - I don't think many countries are that lackadaisical about sophisticated international criminals who get caught.
I don't understand the lackadaisical attitude toward likely recidivism in any case, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how would "international" make anybody become harsher? "Good thing for our local criminal that he's in our custody where all we'd have to do to crack down is say the word, not halfway around the world where we'd have to declare war to get him properly punished, because a declaration of war we'd totally do!" If anything I'd expect the modern west to go easier on fargroup members while the "modern" North Korea would be happy to oblige.
My claim is not that France would be more assiduous in trying to punish a Nork attacking France than a Frenchman attacking France - as you point out, the French can't punish an individual Nork in North Korea without North Korean co-operation or an unacceptable risk of nuclear war. The point I am making is that the French would be more assiduous if a Frenchman (or a foreigner operating on French territory) attacked a friendly country (and got caught, which is admittedly unlikely) than if said delinquent frog was only attacking French targets.
As a matter of international law, sovereign states are expected to prevent their territory being used to attack countries they are not at war with. At least as regards countries which are actually friendly, countries take this obligation seriously.
If you take the cynical view that states protect their own interests and not the interests of their populations, embarrassing the King on the international stage is a worse crime than violating the King's peace domestically.
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