
How the U.S. Military Uses IRC to Wage War - Jaigus
http://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/
======
angersock
Perhaps the funniest/scariest snippet of the article is a chat transcript:

    
    
      [03:31:27] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> IMMEDIATE Fire Mission, POO, Grid 28M MC 13245 24512, Killbox 32AY1SE, POI GRID 28M MC 14212 26114, Killbox 32AY3NE, MAX ORD 8.5K
      [03:31:28] <CRC_Resolute> 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, stby wkng
      [03:31:57] <CRC_Resolute> 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, Resolute all clear
      [03:32:04] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> c
      [03:41:23] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> EOM
      [03:41:31] <CRC_Resolute> c
    

It's a like a normal botnet, except it's commanding our troops.

I thought it would be cool to do something like this as a hackathon project
proof-of-concept; apparently I'm too late. Doing something like this for civil
defense purposes would be pretty cool.

~~~
dsl
The funny bit is that it is almost exclusively referred to as "mIRC chat."

I don't know how extensively it is used elsewhere, but IRC is considered a
primary communications method (and often the preferred vs. land lines, sat
phones, and secure radios) for UAV pilots communicating with Air Traffic
Control and the Control and Reporting Center.

~~~
vacri
I thought the funny bit was "Fire mission, POO".

A friend of mine worked in dis/connections support at an ISP+phone company.
Proof-of-ownership was something they needed for any connection, and the
acronym was used regularly throughout the workday. But she said on the phone,
you'd sometimes forget and ask the customer things like "what poo can you give
me?".

~~~
dfc
POO = Point of origin for indirect fire

------
charonn0
Upon reflection, I find that it's not at all surprising that IRC is so widely
used in the military establishment.

Military operations are, by definition, carried out by different coordinating
groups sometimes thousands of miles apart. IRC is ideal for such a task as it
provides a conferencing platform that is easy to use, develop, and deploy (in
both the software sense and the military sense.)

It's unconcerned with the transport layer, so a wide variety of transport
systems (which can include any manner of authentication and security) can be
used: from a General or Admiral at a desktop client to drones mid-flight to
boots-on-ground soldiers carrying a pocket-sized device. IRC is also a common
technique for C&C in certain malware families.

~~~
OGC
I remember being in irc channels used for organizing tactics and strategies in
browsergames. It was widely used for that.

------
AYBABTME
The main advantages of using IRC over radio comms is that:

* It's way more reliable than radio comms (you don't need to ask people to repeat everything all the time, you read your grids right the first time).

* It's concurrent, you can have multiple units reporting at the same time.

* It's buffered, you can skip stuff and come back to it later.

* It's cheap, anybody can get a window opened on the current ops and see what's going on, without needing all the hardware of a radio.

* It makes the reporting very fast.

* It makes collation/data collection much easier.

* It's scriptable, you can automate the collection of some messages, or the emission of some others.

They got that integrated at pretty much every level, and I think it's one of
the most enabling thing available right now for C2C nodes, in many armies (not
just US).

------
manacit
The creator and developer of mIRC - Khaled Mardam-Bey - is Syrian and
Palestinian, I wonder how often his software is used for tactical purposes
against those countries?

------
NelsonMinar
It surprises me that IRC is used. In part because IRC is old and crufty and, I
fear, not very secure. Also because IRC isn't some milspec contract that made
some insider hundreds of millions of dollars. It's great to adapt an existing
chat technology but it surprises me.

I recently read "Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and
Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story" and it talks a lot about how UAV pilots hang out
in chat rooms sharing intel during operations. Asynchronous text is the
perfect medium for this kind of thing; low bandwidth, doesn't require a lot of
attention. Just crazy to think it'd be IRC.

~~~
zinkem
I often come across these types of comments about the IRC protocol being
'crufty,' 'old,' etc. I recently (a year ago) implemented a subset of the IRC
protocol for a project and I thought it was fairly modern, and not difficult
to work with.

Yes, IRC has some problems, it wasn't built with security in mind. I think dsl
below offers a solution to some of these concerns.

But this still leads me to ask the question, what does a modern distributed
chat protocol look like?

~~~
OGC
Uh, how does dsl offer a solution?

~~~
zacksjoden
dsl the user: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5148079>

------
revelation
From the Manning pretrial:

    
    
      Defense (Coombs): D6 machines used primarily for...?
      Fulton: Analysis.
      Defense (Coombs): mIRC chat as a baseline?
      Fulton: Yes.
      Defense (Coombs): In fact, mIRC chat was installed on your machine as an executable desktop application?
      Fulton: I think so.
    

I wonder if they have netsplits over there.. gives a whole new meaning to
EPIPE (Broken pipe).

------
rdl
The really amusing thing is when they buy huge LCD TVs and projectors to run
IRC clients in an operations center.

And then call it "mIRC" because that's the crappy Windows client they use.

~~~
rschmitty
I actually miss mIRC... xchat is the best I've found for ubuntu, whats a good
alternative?

~~~
hexonexxon
irssi <http://www.irssi.org/>

~~~
rdl
Indeed, irssi is the only acceptable choice.

~~~
Gorgias
Combined with Screen. I suppose that goes without saying.

~~~
TkTech
I've found it vastly more convenient to run ZNC (or the like) on the server
and use irssi locally. Otherwise I typically have to fight with key bindings
and finicky settings on each machine (some of which I can't change). This also
lets you use any number of clients.

For example, I'm running irssi on my laptop, colloquy on my iPhone, and a few
scripts which handle pushing notifications, all from the same connection.

~~~
rdl
I've always used screen, but may switch to a bouncer next, mainly to get
better support on mobile, and the ability to route notifications. It does seem
like a more elegant solution.

------
dendory
IRC is great and relaying on such a simple and well understood process is
smart. It provides group chat, persistency, and is much clearer than trying to
decipher a dozen people talking on a radio frequency.

~~~
vacri
The company I have just started at uses skype for its chat requirements. I
hate it for a few reasons, but mostly because you can go back and change an
existing chat message, leaving no trace that there'd been an edit.

~~~
lhnn
I loathe it because of the repeated privacy concerns, reliance on a central
company for not only its development but its OPERATION, and the presence of
many competitors.

VoIP PBXes for "phone call" style video/audio

Mumble/Vent/Teamspeak for audio/text chatrooms

------
ryanmarsh
The SF guys I hung out with had/were using IRC on their laptop back in 2004 to
communicate with other elements and their HQ which was God knows where. I was
airborne infantry and we had an SF team on our camp, we worked mostly
separately but hung out together a lot. After he showed it to me he told me
the call signs were never to be repeated. I couldn't remember them if I wanted
to. They had the laptop hooked up to sat coms. It was pretty cool for back
then.

~~~
EliRivers
I read that as San Francisco and wondered why a bunch of hipsters from the Bay
were being so retro :(

------
gnosis
That my work may be used for highly unethical purposes such as waging war is
one reason that makes me think twice before releasing software.

~~~
acabal
I think about this sometimes, and I think it ultimately comes down to how
society acts as a whole, which is mostly out of our direct control. Society
can use any tool for good or evil; just as a knife can cut bread or hurt a
person, so too can Apache serve Wikipedia or serve the MPAA/RIAA's intranet.

There's definitely a cutoff point (if you're designing a nuclear-tipped
rocket, there's usually just one reason for that) but stressing about whether
or not the general-purpose software we create will be used for evil will only
frustrate the cause of good.

~~~
csense
> a nuclear-tipped rocket

What if your nuclear arms are never meant to actually be used, but the
implicit threat of having that capability will keep your country from being
bullied by other countries?

Not even nuclear weapons are entirely black-and-white.

~~~
jackpirate
Frankly, I find that about as black as black gets.

Playing chicken with the future of the whole world in order to gain a little
bit of negotiating leverage? Pure evil.

~~~
afarrell
You seem to imply that "a little bit of negotiating leverage" is of trivial
consequence rather than a question of how many people were at the mercy of a
corrupt and perversely-incentivized bureaucrat or an abusive factory owner.

We didn't fight the cold war over which side you butter your bread on.

~~~
jackpirate
_a question of how many people were at the mercy of a corrupt and perversely-
incentivized bureaucrat or an abusive factory owner_

I can't tell if you're complaining about the USSR or the USA...

Joking aside, I know the reasons the west fought the cold war, and I don't
think they were justified.

------
Zarathust
What really saddens me is the high probability that they spend billions of
dollars every year to build custom, fancy comm protocols that nobody uses

~~~
btown
To be fair, I'd imagine that the majority of this money and effort is spent on
highly secure and fault-tolerant transport protocols, and IRC is just a layer
on top of those. So it's likely not being _totally_ wasted.

And even the comm protocols designed to replace the IRL level? Think of those
from an agile-development perspective; if they don't build it to test their
assumptions in the real world, then they could be making an inefficient
product. And in this business, an inefficient product can mean lives lost.

~~~
btown
EDIT (since it's too late to actually edit the post): IRC, not IRL. There's
some sort of pun dangerously close to surfacing here, but since this isn't
Reddit, I'm not going to resist taking the bait.

------
johngalt
I wonder if they've compensated the developer of mIRC.

------
dobbsbob
Looks like a LARP channel

~~~
npsimons
Well, it's about as live action as you can get, and they are playing a role .
. .

------
i386
Wow, Khaled Mardam Bey (author of mIRC) must be rolling in gigantic piles of
US Military cash if they have standardised on it.

------
oelmekki
And I thought they had real time satellite monitoring with command & conquer
like interfaces. I'm so disappointed.

------
Eliezer
If they fight on IRC... I can win.

