Summary: On July 23, India’s I4C gave GitHub a three-hour window to disable three Bitchat repositories under the permissionlesstech account, citing IT Act and IT Rules provisions. Jack Dorsey’s Bluetooth app sends encrypted messages between nearby devices without internet, servers, phone numbers, or accounts. The notice targeted capability after protests and an internet suspension, but police had not confirmed unlawful use of Bitchat.
On July 24, a government order to remove something became the open-source community’s global talking point. India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an office under the Ministry of Home Affairs, sent GitHub a letter asking it to disable the repositories tied to Bitchat, the Bluetooth messaging app built by Jack Dorsey. Dorsey put screenshots of the notice on X along with the words: “the Government of India does not like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down.” What the order sought to remove was neither a post nor an account — it was open-source code.
A Three-Hour Window
The notice, which The Hindu and Decrypt obtained, shows I4C writing to GitHub on July 23 with a three-hour window to disable three repositories under the permissionlesstech account: the main Bitchat project, the Android build, and the Android releases page. The grounds cited are Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, 2000, and Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 IT Rules — the familiar provision under which a platform that fails to take down flagged content forfeits safe-harbor protection. As of writing, GitHub’s parent Microsoft has not confirmed whether it complied in full. GitHub says it processes government requests transparently: it tells account owners, offers an appeal route, and publishes the records.
Why Bitchat: Talking Without the Internet
Bitchat is an open-source messaging app Dorsey launched in 2025. Encrypted messages travel hop by hop between nearby devices over Bluetooth Low Energy, and it needs no internet, no servers, no phone number and no account. That is precisely what makes it work where networks are shut off — the backdrop to this case.
In late July, Delhi saw youth-led “Cockroach Janta Party” protests over leaked exam papers. After police suspended mobile internet around Parliament and Jantar Mantar, demonstrators turned to Bluetooth messaging apps to coordinate. On that basis the notice argues that decentralized, peer-to-peer architectures of this kind “significantly impede lawful interception, attribution, and investigation,” and could be misused to coordinate unlawful assemblies, spread misinformation, or conspire in crime. What police have not confirmed is that Bitchat itself was put to any unlawful use — a capability is what is being targeted, not a proven act. Bluetooth mesh apps fill a narrow but important niche: they are the last channel still open once a government turns connectivity off, which is exactly why shutdown orders and app takedowns tend to arrive together.
The Legal Grounds and the Platform’s Position
India’s censorship machinery runs on the incentives of safe harbor: leave notified content in place and the platform itself takes on the liability. What GitHub faces is a concrete business sum — three repositories under a single account, measured against the operating risk to the whole platform in India.
Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group, described the takedown as “unconstitutional and authoritarian,” pointing out that the notice names no unlawful content and targets nothing beyond what the software is capable of. Here the case gets hardest: India’s constitutional free-speech protections are built around “speech,” and whether code counts as speech, or capability counts as content, is a question Indian legal practice has not settled. Section 79 of the IT Act is the pivot — a platform keeps its immunity for third-party content only so long as it removes material once the government notifies it. That design lends takedown orders the force of an ultimatum: comply, or own everything on your servers. It is the same lever pulled in earlier disputes over speech, now aimed at a repository instead of a post.
The Censor’s Target: Open-Source Code
What matters over the long run is larger than the fate of a single app. First, the order covered code and release files rather than any particular message; reviewing code as “content” is becoming a routine operation on major platforms. Second, the effect is close to nil: within hours the repositories had been mirrored to GitLawb, a decentralized platform — and code that is public cannot be put back in the bottle. Third, this is not a first: China ordered Bitchat pulled from Apple’s App Store in April, and India has now pushed the battlefield onto the code-hosting platform itself.
For developers the takeaway is straightforward: host your project on a centralized platform and jurisdiction risk is real. When what your software can do collides with a government’s enforcement imagination, the notice may give you three hours. Backup mirrors and release channels you can move are turning from an optional extra into baseline infrastructure.