India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an arm of the Ministry of Home Affairs, ordered GitHub to remove three code repositories of Bitchat, the Bluetooth mesh messaging app backed by Block CEO Jack Dorsey, giving the Microsoft-owned platform three hours to comply. The order was issued under Section 79(3)(b) of India’s Information Technology Act, 2000, without citing specific unlawful content. Bitchat routes messages phone-to-phone over Bluetooth mesh, relaying through up to seven hops with Noise protocol encryption, requiring no account, phone number, or server. The takedown comes amid a youth-led protest movement over exam-paper leaks, with the Ministry of Home Affairs having suspended mobile internet around the Jantar Mantar site about five times since July 17. The repositories had more than 3,000 public forks at press time, and India joins China in moving against Bitchat after Beijing ordered Apple to pull the app from its local App Store in April.
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