AINEWS
The Indian cybercrime agency wants Bitchat, an open source Bluetooth messenger by Jack Dorsey that works without the internet, removed over its architecture, not specific content.
On the night of July 23, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), which sits under the Ministry of Home Affairs, sent GitHub a notice, number 11072601011432, ordering the code-hosting platform to restrict access to three Bitchat repositories within three hours (TechCrunch). Bitchat is an open-source, Bluetooth-powered messaging app built by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that runs without the internet. India's cybercrime agency argues that very capability makes it a national-security problem.
The notice does not point to a single unlawful post, message, or line of code. It argues that because Bitchat can function during internet shutdowns and has no central server, it should be taken down. That legal theory, an architecture-based takedown of open-source code, is the part that legal experts in India say does not hold up.
"You cannot go to a court and say, 'We are uncomfortable with the architecture of this piece of code,'" said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the digital-rights group SFLC.in and a long-time intermediary-liability lawyer (TechCrunch). Choudhary said that before 2021, India removed online content through a deliberately narrow legal path: Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000, paired with the 2009 Blocking Rules, which set out who can order a block, what it must specify, and how the affected party can appeal. The Bitchat notice does not run through that process.
What it does run through, on its own header, is Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, 2000, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021, language that, in normal practice, describes the conditions under which an intermediary such as a platform like GitHub gets safe-harbor protection from liability for user content (TechCrunch). The notice's operative paragraphs add Sections 43, 84B and 84C of the IT Act, plus Sections 61 read with 196 and 197 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, the criminal code that replaced the Indian Penal Code. Bitchat author Jack Dorsey disclosed the order on Friday via X, sharing the cover page and the operative detail page with the public (status 2080565084586135773; cover page image; operative detail image).
The Hindu reported the I4C-MHA notice to GitHub and the three-hour compliance window. The Print tied it to the broader Jantar Mantar protest context in New Delhi.
That protest backdrop is the trigger, not the substance. For weeks, students demonstrating under the so-called "cockroach" movement, a name adopted in defiance of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's reported description of student protesters, have marched at Jantar Mantar over alleged exam paper leaks. Internet shutdowns followed the demonstrations, and reporting cited by TechCrunch says some protesters downloaded Bitchat and Briar, an older open-source, offline messenger built for activists and journalists, to keep talking through the cuts (TechCrunch). The I4C notice frames Bitchat's offline, decentralized design as a deliberate mechanism to "circumvent lawful restrictions" and "impede lawful interception, attribution and traceability," the language of an architecture case, not a content case.
Two procedural details sharpen the legal question. First, the notice does not name specific unlawful repositories; it lists only the three Bitchat project pages, including the Bitchat Android releases feed, alongside bitchat and bitchat-android. That is a software project, not a forum or a file. Second, the three-hour window is far shorter than the ten-day clock that runs under the 2009 Blocking Rules. India has used those rules, with their inter-ministerial committee review, to block TikTok, WeChat, and other apps in past years. It did not use them here.
Whether GitHub complied is not in the public record as of writing. The repositories could not be independently verified for current status. That is a known-unresolved item for the fact-check pass.
The precedent being tested, though, is bigger than Bitchat. If a safe-harbor clause can be repurposed to remove a piece of open-source code because of how it is built, the same logic reaches Briar, the mesh-chat app Bridgefy, end-to-end-encrypted messengers that route around cell towers, and any future tool designed to keep working when the network is cut. India's Bitchat notice does not yet have a court ruling behind it. That is exactly why the next ten days, and the next politically inconvenient offline app, are the ones to watch.