As part of an initiative to make separatist coordination more difficult, the Indian government has begun blocking 14 messaging apps. Among the blocked applications were open projects Element and Briar. The formal reason for blocking is the lack of representative offices of these projects in India, which are legally responsible for application-related activities and, under current Indian law, are required to provide information about users.
The Free Software Community of India (FSCI) in India opposed the blocking, pointing out that these projects are not centrally managed, support direct data exchange between users, and their work may be important for organizing communications during natural disasters. In addition, the presence of open source and the decentralized nature of projects does not allow efficient blocking.
For example, attackers can make changes to bypass protocol-level blocking, use P2P messaging bypassing servers, or deploy their own servers that are unknown to the institutions maintaining the block lists. What's more, the Briar app allows you to organize communication in the form of a mesh network, in which traffic is transmitted through the direct interaction of users' phones via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, without requiring an Internet connection.
Source: opennet.ru