A leak of over 500 gigabytes of source code and internal documents has exposed how China is selling censorship tools modeled after its so-called Great Firewall to other countries.
Newsweek has contacted the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment by email.
Why It Matters
The Great Firewall is a sophisticated digital system that filters content, monitors traffic and seeks to suppresses dissent and discussion of topics considered sensitive by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. No longer just a domestic tool, this infrastructure is now being marketed abroad.
These technologies offer a ready-made blueprint to monitor citizens and control information, which critics say threatens free speech worldwide.
What To Know
The leak, as reported by the technology site Tom’s Hardware, details how Geedge Networks has exported the company’s commercial platform, the Tiangou secure gateway, to foreign governments, allowing them to monitor, filter and block internet traffic at scale. Newsweek has contacted Geedge for comment by email.
This turnkey system includes both software and hardware that can be deployed at telecom data centers and operated by local governments, boosting their ability to filter internet traffic, identify virtual private networks and tailor censorship to specific users.
Recipient countries named in the report include Pakistan, Myanmar, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan.
Myanmar’s state telecom used Geedge’s hardware to monitor up to 81 million connections at once. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s telecom authority used it to carry out real-time blanket surveillance of mobile networks, per the report.
The news of the leak came on the heels of an Amnesty International report on the “collusion” of international firms—including China’s Geedge and companies from Germany, the U.S., France, Canada and the United Arab Emirates—that provided Pakistan with surveillance tech.
“This is nothing short of a vast and profitable economy of oppression, enabled by companies and States failing to uphold their obligations under international law,” the human rights organization wrote in a statement.
What People Are Saying
Geedge said of the Tiangou secure gateway on its website: “TSG is a full-featured, one-stop solution for network perimeter security. … TSG could be deployed at high-bandwidth, complex environments, such as large data centers and ISP backbone networks, and adapt to different network environments with a flexible architecture.”
Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at the University of Surrey, wrote on X: “The Great Firewall of China recently leaked masses of data demonstrating why monitoring/control systems like this represent a major security single point of failure when governments apply them to the Internet.”