[bb88]

Well, I mean IRC is typically a cess pool these days. So there's a very high likelihood that something may be scanning urls you send across. DCC was a thing back in the IRC days of old, but CGNAT pretty much ended that.

I think what's most interesting along this lines is what happened during WWII when the allies cracked the enigma. Suddenly, they knew what the nazis were sending to each other. Bletchley Park had to keep most of the intelligence secret to itself, because the nazis could get wind of it and changes the procedures to encryption -- particularly if some top secret attack was somehow thwarted out of the blue.

That's why I said the part about "parallel construction". During WWII if the allies captured a spy or a high ranking officer, then they could maybe act on one piece of information -- giving the allies the necessary plausible deniability by blaming it on the captured nazi officer.