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How the U.S. Military Uses IRC to Wage War
- charonn0 14y agoUpon 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 14y agoI remember being in irc channels used for organizing tactics and strategies in browsergames. It was widely used for that.
- Zarathust 14y agoWhat really saddens me is the high probability that they spend billions of dollars every year to build custom, fancy comm protocols that nobody uses
- peterwwillis 14y agoWhat really saddens me is there's ways to kill people using IRC and i'm only finding out now. It would have made trolling a lot easier back in the day.
- btown 14y agoTo 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 14y agoEDIT (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.
- angersock 14y agoPerhaps 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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoPOO = Point of origin for indirect fire
- fuzzix 14y agoI guess somebody has to be buying licenses for mIRC.
- subsystem 14y ago
- gnosis 14y agoThat my work may be used for highly unethical purposes such as waging war is one reason that makes me think twice before releasing software.
- car54whereareu 14y agoIf your software works people will use it for something ethical or something unethical. If it works well unethical people will use it and ethical people won't touch it, because it isn't approved by the establishment of ethical people, it isn't the status quo etc. This really happened with nginx. A group of people in 2003 or so wouldn't use nginx because youporn used it.
- dmix 14y agoWhat about TOR? It's used for war and child porn but it also has a thousand other use-cases where it's helping fight repression and supports free speech, privacy, etc.
- acabal 14y agoI 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.
- dobbsbob 14y agoLooks like a LARP channel
- NelsonMinar 14y agoIt 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.
- dsl 14y agoIt is easier to ensure absolute security of the transport layer and the physical facilities the computers are in, as opposed to designing absolute security of every application. The DoD runs its own worldwide IP network called DISN, on top of which many compartmentalized networks run. Check out http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Intel_GreenDoor.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Intel_Gre... for a visual example.
- zinkem 14y agoI 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 14y agoUh, how does dsl offer a solution?
- zacksjoden 14y agodsl the user: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5148079 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5148079
- rdl 14y agoThe 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.
- chiph 14y agoI'm surprised they haven't renamed it MilChat.
- rschmitty 14y agoI actually miss mIRC... xchat is the best I've found for ubuntu, whats a good alternative?
- hexonexxon 14y agoirssi http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.irssi.org/
- rdl 14y agoIndeed, irssi is the only acceptable choice.
- Gorgias 14y agoCombined with Screen. I suppose that goes without saying.
- lelandbatey 14y agoTruly, it is the only way to roll! I run IRSSI on my server, allowing my to stay perpetually connected. Additionally, I can join from any device that supports SSH! It's a great solution, even if it's a bit hard to get used to at first.
- TkTech 14y agoI'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.
- dendory 14y agoIRC 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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoI 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
- revelation 14y agoFrom 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).
- johngalt 14y agoI wonder if they've compensated the developer of mIRC.
- manacit 14y agoThe 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?
- Eliezer 14y agoIf they fight on IRC... I can win.
- i386 14y agoWow, Khaled Mardam Bey (author of mIRC) must be rolling in gigantic piles of US Military cash if they have standardised on it.
- ryanmarsh 14y agoThe 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 14y agoI read that as San Francisco and wondered why a bunch of hipsters from the Bay were being so retro :(
- AYBABTME 14y agoThe 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).
- oelmekki 14y agoAnd I thought they had real time satellite monitoring with command & conquer like interfaces. I'm so disappointed.