\n<\/p>\n
A <\/span>trove 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 \u201cGreat Firewall\u201d 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 \u201cdigital authoritarianism as a service.\u201d<\/p>\n But I want to focus on another thing the documents demonstrate: While people often look at China\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n GoLaxy\u2019s main business is different from Geedge\u2019s: 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 \u201cnumber one brand in intelligence big data analysis\u201d 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.<\/p>\n But there are also quite a few things that make the two companies comparable, particularly in terms of how their businesses function. Both Geedge and GoLaxy maintain close relationships with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the top government-affiliated research institution in the world, according to the Nature Index. And they both market their services to Chinese provincial-level government agencies, who have localized issues they want to monitor and budgets to spend on surveillance and propaganda tools.<\/p>\n GoLaxy didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. In a previous response to The New York Times, the company denied collecting data targeting US officials and called the outlet\u2019s reporting misinformation. Vanderbilt researchers say they witnessed the company remove pages from its website after the initial reporting.<\/p>\n In the West, when academic scholars see opportunities to commercialize their cutting-edge research, they often become startup founders or start side businesses. GoLaxy seems to be no exception. Many key researchers at the company, according to the leaked document, still occupy spots at CAS.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s no guarantee that CAS researchers will get government grants\u2014just like a public university professor in the US can\u2019t bet on their startup winning federal contracts. Instead, they need to go after government agencies like any private company would go after clients. One document in the leak shows that GoLaxy assigned sales targets to five employees and was aiming to secure 42 million RMB (about $5.9 million) in contracts with Chinese government agencies in 2020. Another spreadsheet from around 2021 lists the company\u2019s current clients, which include branches of the Chinese military, state security, and provincial police departments, as well as other potential customers it was targeting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A trove 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 \u201cGreat Firewall\u201d to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[2474,5050,11672,8034,2263],"class_list":{"0":"post-20638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-chinas","9":"tag-operate","10":"tag-propaganda","11":"tag-surveillance","12":"tag-systems"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Closer Than They Seem<\/strong><\/h2>\n