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Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World
Geedge Networks, a company with ties to the founder of China’s mass censorship infrastructure, is selling its censorship and surveillance systems to at least four other countries in Asia and Africa.
Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018 that counts the “father” of China’s massive censorship infrastructure as one of its investors, styles itself as a network-monitoring provider, offering business-grade cybersecurity tools to “gain comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks” for its customers, the documents show. Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall—a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers. Researchers were able to pin down four of the foreign government clients to Kazakhstan (K18 and K24), Pakistan (P19), Ethiopia (E21), and Myanmar (M22) by combing through documents in the leak for mentions of data centers’ geographic locations, tracking international cargo records from Geedge to other countries, and drawing from prior reporting on Chinese companies’ involvement in selling censorship software.
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