Indian government intervenes to remove Bitchat repositories from GitHub 📡

Indian government intervenes to remove Bitchat repositories from GitHub 📡

Background
An order from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, to GitHub to block the Bitchat app
Protesters in Delhi used Bluetooth networks (Bluetooth Mesh) after the government cut off mobile internet

Focus
A 3-hour notice was sent under Section 79(3)(b) of India's Information Technology Act to remove 3 repositories from the permissionlesstech organization
Reason for the action: lawful interception is impossible and there is no way to monitor messages sent without internet or servers
Official confirmation of the matter by Jack Dorsey on the social network X, along with disclosure of the notice

Implications
Removing the main repositories is relatively ineffective given the existence of more than 2,400 forks and the decentralized nature of the network
A serious challenge for regulators in dealing with offline communication tools and mesh networks

Conclusion
This confrontation shows that decentralized, mesh-network-based communication technologies have severely limited governments' ability to impose censorship and cut off communications 🎯

#India #GitHub #Jack_Dorsey #mesh_network #internet_censorship