The most revealing detail in India’s order to take down Bitchat is the clock. The country’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) did not give GitHub the days that such notices usually allow. It gave the Microsoft-owned platform three hours to remove and disable three code repositories — a deadline that reads less like a legal process and more like an attempt to catch a signal before it spreads.
The app in question is not a social network with millions of accounts to freeze. Bitchat, the decentralized messaging project associated with Jack Dorsey, has no accounts at all. It routes messages directly between nearby phones over Bluetooth mesh networks — no internet, no servers, no phone numbers, no sign-ups. That architecture is exactly what the Indian order objects to, and exactly why an order may not accomplish much.
What the notice actually demands
The notice, issued Thursday by the I4C under the Ministry of Home Affairs, named three repositories under the “permissionlesstech” account: the main Bitchat project, its Android build, and the Android releases page. It invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 IT Rules, and told GitHub to “remove and disable access” to the code “without vitiating any evidence.” The agency also cited provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, India’s overhauled criminal code.
The stated rationale is surveillance capacity. Because Bitchat carries traffic phone-to-phone with no central relay, I4C argued the design “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation,” and warned the app could be exploited during “public disorder, riots, terrorism, organized crime, or internet shutdowns.” The repositories it targeted are public and were, at the time of the order, live on GitHub under the permissionlesstech organization.
Dorsey — the former Twitter chief and Block CEO — surfaced the notice himself, posting it on July 24 with the terse observation that the “government of india does not like technologies like bitchat.” The project’s community account framed the move in starker terms: “Governments that fear people talking without permission will always go after the tools that make it possible.”
The protests behind the timing
Orders like this rarely arrive in a vacuum, and this one did not. It landed as India contends with a youth-led movement over exam-paper leaks, with tens of thousands rallying in Delhi behind the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised fast-track courts for officials accused of rigging exams. Crucially, mobile internet was cut around Parliament and the Jantar Mantar protest site — and with the network down, demonstrators reached for offline tools. Bitchat, which works precisely when the internet does not, was one of them.
That sequence turns a technical complaint into a political one. An app marketed for festivals, disasters, and dead zones becomes, in the middle of a connectivity blackout, an instrument of assembly. The three-hour deadline starts to look like an attempt to close a door that had already been opened during a live protest.
The Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi digital-rights group, condemned the order as “unconstitutional and authoritarian,” arguing that it named no unlawful content and bypassed India’s own website-blocking procedures. The Foundation has spent years documenting how India’s blocking regime operates with little transparency; its objection here is that the state moved against a tool rather than any specific speech.
Why deleting code rarely deletes an idea
There is a category error at the heart of source-code takedowns. Pulling an app from a store limits distribution — most users get software from official channels, and cutting off that channel is a real friction. Removing the source code, by contrast, tries to kill a project outright, and open-source code resists that by design. It can be copied, forked, and mirrored the moment it is threatened.
That is not hypothetical. Within hours of the Indian crackdown, Bitchat’s repositories were mirrored to a decentralized code-collaboration platform, and the underlying build — being open source — remains reproducible by anyone who cloned it beforehand. India is also not the first state to try. China ordered Bitchat pulled from Apple’s App Store in April, echoing Beijing’s 2023 ban on Damus, the Nostr-based app Dorsey backed. Each removal narrowed one distribution path without erasing the software.
The deeper irony is that the takedown validates the app’s premise. Bitchat exists on the bet that communication should not depend on infrastructure a government can switch off. A three-hour order to a centralized code host, issued while mobile data is throttled around a protest site, is close to a live demonstration of the problem the app was built to route around. Days earlier, Dorsey’s Block had launched Buzz, a decentralized platform pitched explicitly at reducing reliance on GitHub — a hedge that now looks prescient.
As of this writing, Microsoft has not said whether it met the three-hour deadline. Whatever GitHub decides, the code is already elsewhere. That is the recurring lesson of these orders: you can pressure a host, you can bar a store, but a protocol that runs between two phones in Bluetooth range has no single address to serve a notice to.
