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India cuts internet, then demands removal of bitchat's code<br>July 25, 2026 at 06:11<br>BY<br>KORBEN ✨<br>4 MIN READ<br>/Related categories
Listen to this article<br>~ 4 minOn July 23 at exactly 11:16 PM, GitHub received a notice from India's Ministry of Home Affairs with a countdown of just 3 hours. What this notice demanded was the removal of 3 code repositories - and not just any repositories. Those of<br>bitchat<br>, Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth messaging app that works without any network whatsoever.<br>Three days earlier, on July 20, students from the Cockroach Janata Party were demonstrating at Jantar Mantar, right in the center of Delhi, demanding the resignation of the Education Minister.<br>Police dispersed their march with batons and tear gas, shut down metro stations, and cut mobile internet around the site. So after 2 days of blackout, protesters switched to apps that don't need it.<br>Bitchat, released last summer, does exactly that. Each phone communicates via Bluetooth Low Energy with those within range - about thirty meters - and relays messages from device to device. In a dense crowd, the relay chain can push that range to 300 meters and beyond.<br>No account to create, no phone number to provide. There's also no central server, and private messages use Noise Protocol encryption. Then when the network comes back, the app switches to the Nostr protocol for worldwide reach.<br>Bitchat's iOS code is in the public domain, as is the Android version under GPL-3.0. Dorsey had actually pulled out the same toolkit just a few days ago with<br>Buzz, his team chat app<br>The app, says the notice from the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, "enables communication even during network restrictions" and creates "a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organizations, and organized criminal groups." Further on, it's criticized for an architecture that impedes "lawful interception, attribution, and investigation." In plain terms, the complaint is that it keeps working when the state has cut the internet.<br>On the legal side, the order relies on Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules - the provisions in India that protect hosts from liability for content published by their users.<br>The listed offenses range from unauthorized access to a computer system to aiding and abetting, plus three articles from India's new penal code on criminal conspiracy and threats to national unity. Yes, really, for a code repository... Naturally, the Internet Freedom Foundation calls the move "unconstitutional and authoritarian" and criticizes it for bypassing the official blocking procedure. Sure, Section 79 grants conditional immunity, but it absolutely does not open up a right to censor, and above all, this notice doesn't identify any specific unlawful message or file - it targets the entire project. In short, it's far too vague!<br>And even if the Indian government's wildest dreams came true, taking down a repository doesn't take down much. If you already have the app on your phone, it stays there, and a mesh network that depends on no server keeps passing messages around regardless of what happens to the GitHub page.<br>MediaNama<br>reports that GitHub complied and removed the links from its platform. Since I can still access them, I think this only applies to India and that GitHub handled it via geoblocking. But regardless, that plus the Streisand effect meant that in the hours following the notice, the code had already been copied to other sites. It's open source, so it can be forked every which way.<br>Either way, this isn't the first time this messaging app has served as a backup plan for people - in Nepal, in September 2025, it was downloaded nearly 49,000 times in a single day during the Gen Z protests, accounting for nearly 40% of its global adoption from that one country alone. Cutting the network to calm a crowd is something<br>Egypt already tried back in January 2011 [FR]<br>Syria a few months later [FR]<br>, and as we know, it doesn't work.<br>Source
Add Korben to my<br>preferred sources<br>Referenceshttps://bitchat.free/<br>https://www.medianama.com/2026/07/223-github-bitchat-home-ministry-order/<br>https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/government-orders-github-to-remove-bluetooth-based-chat-app-bitchat-over-security-concerns-jack-dorsey/article71262049.ece
This article was originally written in French and automatically translated. Read the original.<br>This article may contain AI-generated images. I take great care with every article, but if you spot a slip-up, let me know!<br>Author :
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