Govt Orders GitHub To Takedown Jack Dorsey's Bluetooth App Bitchat Over Security Concerns

India's Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, functioning under the Ministry of Home Affairs, has asked GitHub to take down all pages hosting the source code of Bitchat, the decentralised, offline messaging application created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

The takedown request, which surfaced on Friday, has triggered a fresh debate on encryption, surveillance and the limits of government control over communication technology that operates outside conventional internet infrastructure.

The development comes days after allegations that mobile internet services were disabled during protests in Delhi on Thursday, a move that has added to concerns over the state's approach to digital connectivity during periods of public unrest.

Dorsey confirmed the takedown order on X, posting photographs of the communication and writing, "The govt of India is making demands for this tech to be shut down." His statement quickly drew attention to Bitchat, an app that, until then, was known mainly within tech circles rather than to the general public.

Bitchat began in July last year as what Dorsey has described as a weekend experiment. He said he built its core functionality to explore low-level network technologies such as Bluetooth mesh, store-and-forward networks and encryption. "The initial intention was super simple," Dorsey wrote on the app's GitHub forum, adding that the goal was "the ability for you to exchange text messages with someone in your vicinity that you've never met before" without either party needing to share a phone number or an email address. He likened the idea to Firechat, an earlier peer-to-peer app that relied on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct.

Unlike WhatsApp or Telegram, which need mobile data and a stable internet connection to function, Bitchat relies on Bluetooth Low Energy to build a mesh network. Every device running the app can act as both sender and relay, so a message either reaches a nearby user directly or hops through a chain of intermediate devices until it reaches its destination. This multi-hop design allows communication well beyond ordinary Bluetooth range, though it depends on enough active users being present in an area for the network to function effectively.

Because it does not require a phone number or any other identifier to operate in its Bluetooth mode, Bitchat offers users a significant degree of anonymity. Its developers describe the system as a "dual-transport architecture," pairing Bluetooth mesh with the Nostr protocol, an open framework for decentralised social networking, for internet-based communication whenever connectivity is available. The app was designed to keep people connected during natural disasters, large gatherings or prolonged network outages, situations in which conventional internet infrastructure often fails.

It is this very resilience that appears to have drawn the attention of Indian security agencies. The concerns reportedly center on Bitchat's ability to function outside the reach of lawful interception mechanisms that investigators rely on to trace suspects. An app built to keep people talking when networks go down is now at the centre of a larger question about how far a government can, or should, go in regulating technology designed specifically to resist centralised control.

Inputs from The Print