Well lets look at this from a different perspective. There are channels that engage in illegal activities. As of now, authorities can't get much info without a warrant, they can just get the IP (assuming the network doesn't have hostmasking) and not much more. Now consider something like a child porn room. An undercover cop joins and pretends to be a 13 year old girl who wants to see a webcam of one of the ops in the channel (who is most likely a ~40 year old guy). In the past, the only thing cops could do to track the guy down were stage fake meetings (which would likely have ended in rape if it were a real meeting), and then catch the guy. Webcams change that a bit. The cops convince the guy to show himself on a webcam. Using this, along with his IP to get a rough estimate of where he is located, they can track this person down much more easily. If you look at it like that, webcams on IRC could lead to a safer chatting experience.
