India's cybercrime agency has ordered the removal of three repositories for the messaging application Bitchat, developed by Jack Dorsey, from the code-hosting platform GitHub. Bitchat is notable for its ability to transmit encrypted messages and Bitcoin transactions over Bluetooth mesh networks without requiring an internet connection. Protesters in Delhi have reportedly been using such mesh-network tools to communicate during government-imposed internet outages.

Protests and Government Intervention

The Cybercrime Coordination Centre of India, operating under the Ministry of Home Affairs, issued the takedown order targeting three Bitchat repositories hosted on GitHub. The order states that the app's lack of user registration and centralized logging makes legal surveillance and criminal investigations more difficult.

Protesters demonstrating against a national exam scandal have turned to decentralized communication tools like Bitchat to maintain contact despite government-imposed internet blackouts. The demonstrations in Delhi have drawn attention to the role of offline mesh-networking technologies in circumventing connectivity restrictions. India has frequently employed internet shutdowns as a policy tool, consistently ranking among the countries with the highest number of network disruptions globally according to digital rights organizations.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter (now X) and co-founder of Block (formerly Square), has been a prominent advocate for Bitcoin and decentralized technologies.

Bitchat's Features and Effects

Bitchat is designed to transmit encrypted messages directly between mobile phones over Bluetooth mesh networks, operating without internet access, central servers, or user accounts. Each device in the mesh relay network forwards messages to other nearby devices, allowing communication to propagate across a local area even when traditional connectivity is unavailable.

The application can also facilitate Bitcoin transactions offline. These transactions pass from phone to phone through the Bluetooth mesh until they reach a device with an active internet connection, at which point the transaction is broadcast to the Bitcoin network. This feature was specifically designed to ensure payment continuity during government-imposed connectivity disruptions.

Compliance and Availability

It remains unclear whether GitHub complied with the takedown order within the specified three-hour window. GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, has not publicly commented on the matter.

However, the Bitchat application is reportedly still accessible on both the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. Since open-source projects are frequently mirrored across multiple hosting platforms, removal from a single repository does not necessarily mean the underlying code has been completely deleted from the internet.

The original report is available at bitcoinsistemi.