India's Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an arm of the Ministry of Home Affairs, ordered GitHub to remove three code repositories of Bitchat, the Bluetooth mesh messaging app backed by Block CEO Jack Dorsey, giving the Microsoft-owned platform three hours to comply.
Dorsey published the notice on X on July 24. "the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down," he wrote. The post had drawn 2.3 million views by press time.
The order was issued on July 23 under Section 79(3)(b) of India's Information Technology Act, 2000, according to a statement from the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based digital rights group. It directs GitHub to disable access to three repositories under the permissionlesstech account — the main Bitchat project, its Android build, and the Android release files — and threatens the platform with loss of safe-harbor protection and criminal prosecution.
The notice cites no specific unlawful content. Per IFF's reading, the government objects to what the app is: software that enables communication "even during network restrictions" and can "circumvent lawful restrictions" during "internet shutdowns."
Bitchat routes messages phone-to-phone over Bluetooth mesh, relaying through up to seven hops with Noise protocol encryption and falling back to the Nostr protocol when internet is available. The app requires no account, phone number, or server, and its code is released into the public domain.
