India orders GitHub to pull Jack Dorsey's Bitchat mesh messenger

India’s Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), the Home Ministry’s cybercrime unit, has directed GitHub to take down Bitchat, a Bluetooth mesh messaging app built by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey publicized the July 23 takedown notice in an X post, saying the Indian government simply doesn’t want the technology available. GitHub’s parent, Microsoft, has not publicly responded, and I4C did not reply to press queries.

The government’s objection is architectural rather than tied to any specific content. Bitchat routes messages directly between nearby devices over a decentralized Bluetooth mesh, so it keeps working with no internet, cell service, or central server — and without phone-number verification or logging. I4C argues this design defeats lawful interception, attribution, and subscriber-data requests, leaving investigators unable to trace communications or compel a provider’s assistance. It framed the app as a tool that anti-national actors, terrorists, and organized crime could exploit to coordinate during internet shutdowns, and cited provisions of the IT Act as the legal basis.

The timing is pointed: the notice followed a protest at Jantar Mantar where demonstrators turned to Bluetooth messaging after authorities cut internet service around the site. That makes the takedown less about a single app than about the broader threat mesh networking poses to state control over communications during shutdowns — a censorship-resistance property that is precisely what draws privacy advocates and worries governments. Whether GitHub complies, and how such orders hold up against an open-source project that can be forked and re-hosted, will be the real test.