Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis
Atrove of internal documents leaked from a little-known Chinese company has pulled back the curtain on how digital censorship tools are being marketed and exported globally. Geedge Networks sells what amounts to a commercialized “Great Firewall” to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail the capabilities this company has to monitor, intercept, and hack internet traffic. Researchers who examined the files described it as “digital authoritarianism as a service.”
But I want to focus on another thing the documents demonstrate: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development, adapts its business strategy to fit different clients’ needs, and even repurposes leftover infrastructure from its competitors. In Pakistan, for example, Geedge landed a contract to work with and later replace gear made by the Canadian company Sandvine, the leaked files show.
Coincidentally, another leak from a different Chinese company published this week reinforces the same point. On Monday, researchers at Vanderbilt University made public a 399-page document from GoLaxy, a Chinese company that uses AI to analyze social media and generate propaganda materials. The leaked documents, which include internal pitch decks, business goals, and meeting notes, may have come from a disgruntled former employee—the last two pages accuse GoLaxy of mistreating workers by underpaying them and mandating long hours. The document had been sitting on the open internet for months before another researcher flagged it to Brett Goldstein, a research professor in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt.
GoLaxy’s main business is different from Geedge’s: It collects open source information from social media, maps relationships among political figures and news organizations, and pushes targeted narratives online through synthetic social media profiles. In the leaked document, GoLaxy claims to be the “number one brand in intelligence big data analysis” in China, servicing three main customers: the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, and the Chinese military. The included technology demos focus heavily on geopolitical issues like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and US elections. And unlike Geedge, GoLaxy seems to be targeting only domestic government entities as clients.
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