Non-military Uses of The Phrase
The term 'collateral damage' has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to the denial of service to legitimate users when administrators take blanket preventative measures against some individuals who are abusing systems. For example, Realtime Blackhole Lists used to combat email spam generally block ranges of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses rather than individual IPs associated with spam, and can deny legitimate users within those ranges the ability to send email to some domains.
The related term collateral mortality is also becoming prevalent, and probably derives from the term collateral damage. It has been applied to other spheres in addition to the original military context. An example is in fisheries where bycatch of species such as dolphins are called collateral mortality; i.e., they are species that die in pursuit of in the legal death of fishery targets, such as tuna.
Read more about this topic: Collateral Damage
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