what's to say that terrorists aren't going to d/l mIRC and use it to have encrypted communications?
The same could be said for other clients that support it and ditto for the IM clients that support it to (such as Yahoo, Trillian, GAIM...etc...) so the above is a possiblility anyway.
The 'net on the whole, in my opinion, needs to be made a bit more secure (especially e-mail. I wish more ppl used PGP encryption) so why not start with IRC?
Now if only EFnet supported SSL connections...
