The Indian government has blocked a clutch of websites"including Github, the ubiquitous platform that software writers use for sharing and working on open-source code"because they were carrying"anti-India" content from ISIL (a.k.a. Islamic State or ISIS).
According to documents reviewed by Quartz, the decision to ban the websites had been in the works for more than a month.

The video site Vimeo, text repository Pastebin.com, and web-hosting provider Weebly are among the other sites that appear to have been affected.

While Quartz hasn"™t been able to verify the authenticity of the specific document in the tweet above (we have been able to verify others), almost every website on the list was unavailable early afternoon (local time) via at least two internet service providers.
And we weren"™t the only ones to notice.

The government order doing the rounds on Twitter, if authentic, is dated Dec. 17.

Terror threat

The websites were blocked because they were allegedly carrying anti-India content and on the advice of India"™s anti-terrorism squad, according to Arvind Gupta, the national head of the information technology cell at the Bharatiya Janata Party.


Gupta clarified that he was speaking as a party representative.
The head of the Indian government"™s department of electronics and information technology was not available for comment.
Earlier this month, India"™s security agencies went into a tizzy after UK"™s Channel 4 News revealed that a prominent ISIL Twitter handle was based out of Bangalore. The authorities moved swiftly to arrest a 24-year-old engineer, Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who had been operating the Twitter account since 2009.

Multiple sites

Pastebin.com"a text storage service"has been complaining since Dec. 19 that its site is inaccessible in India.

As has Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library.

Any difficulties in accessing Github are sure to be painful for India"™s vast army of software developers, who power one of the bright spots of Indian"™s struggling economy.
In a testament to Github"™s importance, even China"™s powerful censors were forced to unblock the site due to its importance for workers in the country"™s tech industry.
But India isn"™t alone"Russia also banned Github earlier this month.


The Indian government"™s decision to ban 32 websites"including Github and Vimeo"has been in the works for over a month, according to documents reviewed by Quartz.
On Nov. 11, 2014, Mumbai"™s additional chief metropolitan magistrate ordered the Indian government"™s department of electronics and information technology (DEIT) to act on a complaint received by the city"™s Byculla Police Station and block the sites on a"top priority basis."
Certain contents on the sites"appear to be posted with the intention of creating unrest, breach of peace, and communal disharmony," the court said."This might result in law and order problem in India."
Anti-terror request

Then, on Nov. 15, Maharashtra"™s anti-terrorism squad (ATS) also dispatched a letter requesting DEIT to block 32 websites that"were being used for jihadi propaganda."
"It was stated that anti-national group are using social media for mentoring Indian youths to join the jihadi activities," DEIT said in a statement.
The ATS noted that some of these sites were being used by ISIL (a.k.a Islamic State or IS) to"motivate other Indians."
For instance, they had been used to disseminate information about Areeb Majeed"a 23-year-old from Kalyan, who had apparently joined ISIL in Iraq"and Anwar Husain, an Indian national from Karnataka who reportedly died while fighting in Afghanistan in 2014.
"These websites works on page hosting concept. Many of these websites does not require any authentication. Other upload articles, videos or photos or to download the contents which helps to hide the identities," DEIT said.
"These websites were being used frequently for pasting (and) communicating such content by just changing page name even blocking the earlier one," it added.
Some unblocked

DEIT said that it had reached out to some of the 32 website, and a few had already"undertaken not to allow pasting of such propaganda information."
Subsequently, four websites"Weebly, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Github"are being unblocked.
However, the fate of the remaining 28 websites remains unclear.