India Tried To Delete Jack Dorsey's Offline Messaging App From GitHub

There's a specific kind of technical naivety in trying to shut down a decentralized messaging app by removing its source code repository, and India's government just ran directly into it.

Jack Dorsey posted on X on Friday what he says was a notice from India's Ministry of Home Affairs, directing GitHub to restrict access to three repositories for Bitchat his offline, Bluetooth-powered messaging app within three hours. The notice's core argument: Bitchat's anonymous, decentralized architecture could facilitate unlawful activity, letting users communicate during internet shutdowns while making lawful interception more difficult for authorities.

The demand is unusual in a specific way worth flagging immediately. Most government takedown requests target specific illegal content a particular post, message, or piece of media. This notice didn't identify any specific unlawful material at all. Instead, it argued that the app's fundamental architecture the fact that it works without central servers, during shutdowns, without requiring an internet connection is itself the problem.

The timing here isn't coincidental. Indian authorities have been tightening internet restrictions in response to weeks of student-led protests in New Delhi, driven by allegations of leaked examination papers. The demonstrations, dubbed the "cockroach" movement, have drawn thousands of young people demanding the resignation of India's Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, with authorities also restricting planned marches toward parliament.

According to local media reports, some protesters downloaded offline messaging apps including Bitchat and a similar app called Briar specifically after internet services were suspended in the affected areas. That's the direct link between the protests and this takedown notice: Bitchat became a tool protesters could use to keep communicating even when the government cut off conventional internet access.

The download data confirms just how sharply that adoption spiked. According to market intelligence provider Sensor Tower, India accounted for roughly 85% of Bitchat's global downloads between July 17 and July 23 compared to just about 1% over the previous 30 days. The app was downloaded more than 91,000 times in India over five days, with downloads jumping thirty-two-fold on July 19 alone compared to the day before. Daily active users in India hit more than 330,000 on Thursday, the highest level the app has ever recorded in the country.

The Legal Basis Looks Genuinely Shaky

Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Indian digital rights legal advocacy group SFLC.in, told TechCrunch that this represents a real departure from how India has typically handled content removal. Before 2021, the government generally relied on Section 69A of the IT Act combined with the 2009 Blocking Rules when it wanted content taken down nationwide.

Choudhary said this new document resembles the format of recent government takedown notices, but the legal provisions it actually cites don't clearly authorize authorities to remove an entire software project simply because of how that software functions, rather than because of any specific illegal content contained within it. That's a meaningfully different legal theory than what's typically been used it's targeting a tool's architecture and capability, not any documented misuse of it.

The notice itself, dated July 23 and apparently issued by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C, which operates under the Home Ministry), argued that Bitchat enables users to communicate "even during network restrictions" and "internet shutdowns," making it possible to "circumvent lawful restrictions" while hampering "lawful interception, attribution, and traceability."

Deleting A GitHub Repo Doesn't Actually Do Anything

Here's where the takedown attempt runs into a fundamental technical reality that digital rights groups were quick to point out. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based digital rights group, was blunt about the request's practical ineffectiveness: "The order also fails on its own terms as deleting a repository does not delete the application from any phone that carries it, and the mesh keeps functioning without servers. What the takedown actually prevents is scrutiny of the underlying code."

That's a genuinely important distinction. Bitchat works as a mesh network over Bluetooth devices communicate directly with each other, without needing a central server or an internet connection at all. Once someone has the app installed on their phone, removing the source code from GitHub does absolutely nothing to stop that installed app from continuing to function. All a GitHub takedown actually accomplishes is making it harder for new users to inspect the code, verify what it does, or download and compile it themselves going forward it doesn't touch the app's actual operation among people who already have it.

Raman Chima, global program director at the Association for Progressive Communications, framed the deeper implication of this approach even more directly to TechCrunch: "They're [the Indian government] not just targeting the designated service provider, but they're trying to say that open source development of this type of product… should not occur." In other words, this isn't really about stopping specific misuse it's an attempt to suppress the existence of an entire category of decentralized, censorship-resistant software, regardless of whether any individual instance of it is being used unlawfully.

GitHub's Response (Or Lack Thereof)

As of Friday, Bitchat's primary GitHub repository remained fully accessible from India the takedown attempt simply hadn't taken effect. GitHub itself did not confirm whether it had actually received the document Dorsey shared. When TechCrunch asked about the notice specifically, the company pointed to its public repository of government takedown requests, which contained no recent entries related to Bitchat at all.

Rose Coogan, GitHub's principal online safety counsel, provided a statement outlining the company's standard process: "When we receive a complete government takedown request, we notify the affected account owners and give them an opportunity to appeal. We share every government takedown request we take action on publicly." The clear implication is that GitHub either hasn't received a complete, actionable request yet, or hasn't determined the notice meets its own standards for action which would explain why the repositories remain untouched days after the notice was reportedly issued.

The Broader Rights Concern

Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific policy manager and encryption policy lead at digital rights group Access Now, raised a more fundamental concern about what this kind of action actually does during periods of unrest. Blocking an offline messaging platform during internet restrictions risks turning a shutdown into what she called a "communication blackout'' one that violates fundamental rights. Her point cuts to the core tension here: protesters in any democracy have the right to communicate privately and coordinate peacefully, and targeting the specific tools that let them do so during an internet shutdown raises serious questions that go well beyond the technical mechanics of how Bitchat works.

India's Home Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on any of this.

This situation is a genuinely useful case study in the limits of trying to control decentralized technology through centralized legal tools. A government can send a takedown notice to a code-hosting platform, but it can't retroactively delete an app that's already installed on hundreds of thousands of phones, and it can't stop a mesh network from functioning simply by removing the public source code that describes how it works.

What the attempt does accomplish, according to the digital rights groups tracking it, is symbolic and chilling rather than technically effective signaling that certain categories of censorship-resistant software may themselves become targets, independent of whether any specific illegal act has actually been documented. Given that Bitchat's download and usage numbers in India spiked dramatically in direct response to the protests and shutdowns this notice is tied to, the practical effect so far appears to be the opposite of what the notice intended: heightened public attention, sustained accessibility of the repositories, and a much larger user base than the app had just a week earlier.