Massive leak exposes how China’s ‘Great Firewall’ is being exported to other countries

Ali Rogin:

It's known as the Great Firewall, and it's what the Chinese government uses to censor the internet inside its country and block access to select foreign websites. Now a leak of tens of thousands of documents shows that a little known Chinese company with ties to that firewall is exporting those tools to other countries in Africa and Asia, including Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia.

Recently, I spoke with Zeyi Yang, a senior writer at Wired who has been following the story. Zeyi Yang, thank you so much for joining us. First of all, what do we know about the release of these documents itself? What does it tell us?

Zeyi Yang, Senior Writer, WIRED:

So this is a trove of over 100,000 documents that came from anonymous leak. And collectively we see that this documents coming from a Chinese company, Geedge Network, shows that they have very advanced capability to monitor the internet traffic that goes into a whole country and that they're trying to sell and have succeeded in selling this technology to some foreign governments.

Ali Rogin:

And this technology we believe, also undergirds the great firewall itself. So let's take a step back and talk about how that firewall itself works.

Zeyi Yang:

Anyone of the 1.4 billion people in China right now, if they are trying to access internet through their laptops, through their mobile phone, they will have to go through this filtering system that decides what information they can get. And they cannot. It means that blocking certain websites that you cannot see, it means filtering all the results that you get on search engines.

So it's really a very big infrastructure that makes sure people can only see the content that the government deems acceptable to be seen.

Ali Rogin:

And this trove of documents reveals the extent to which this company Geedge is part of this infrastructure. But of course there's also information about the way in which it's selling this technology to other countries. So what do we know specifically about that part of their endeavor?

Zeyi Yang:

What we know so far is that Geedge is a company that mostly operates like any other commercial cybersecurity company. It has hardware and software products that it sells to foreign governments and it helps them makes a very user friendly software to monitor the traffic coming into their country.

Ali Rogin:

And what does this company say in response to criticism that it's engaging in this with other authoritarian countries?

Zeyi Yang:

I don't think a company has responded to what we found this time. But over the years this company has been mostly low profile. It hasn't really been the company that people talk about when they talk about Chinese square firewall. But we are seeing that they actually have quite advanced capabilities and I'm sure we'll see them in news headlines a lot more in the future.

Ali Rogin:

And can you tell us about the connections that one of Geedge shareholders has to the creation of the Great Firewall?

Zeyi Yang:

One thing we found is that back in 2019, the second year that Gage was founded, Fang Bingxin, which is a scientist in China, was actually one of the investors in the companies. And this is the guy who also created the very first prototype of Chinese grid firewall and was credited as the father of China's Great Firewall. And this might be one of his attempts to commercialize that kind of technology and sell it to foreign governments.

Ali Rogin:

Much of this is very opaque. But what do we know about the strategy here of reaching out to particular countries? Is China and or Geedge specifically courting other countries with records of human rights abuses?

Zeyi Yang:

Well, what we do know is that they are targeting companies who already have a will in censorship. For example, before Geedge comes in, the Pakistani government actually has worked with other companies from the Western hemisphere to build their own internet censorship system. But then those companies are sanctioned and they have to withdraw from those local business in Pakistan. And that's when Geedge find an opportunity to come in.

They basically marketed the technology to repurpose the hardware that Pakistan government already have and use them to build this more comprehensive, more updated censorships infrastructure. And what we see is that the Pakistani government has agreed to do that.

Ali Rogin:

And there is some data linking specific countries to using the technology already. But what do we know about other countries that might also be seeking it?

Zeyi Yang:

One thing we found this time is that Geedge Networks has been recruiting more engineers to maintain its infrastructure overseas. And in one specific recording post, they specifically named five countries that engineers might have to be troubled to. And those are Pakistan, Bahrain, India, Malaysia and Algeria.

But we also know that Geedge has been hiring translator who can speak Spanish and French. So it's fair to say they are probably going to target a lot more countries out there.

Ali Rogin:

The documents also show that Geedge is providing services within China to certain provincial governments, including in Xinjiang, where the government is accused of committing human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority. What do we know about that part of the project?

Zeyi Yang:

I think this is one of the more surprising findings from this leak. We're seeing that the experience of building a commercialized product of censorship is also helpful within China. It's also attractive to provincial government within China.

For example, in Xinjiang there will be counterterrorism. That will be how to deal with the ethnic minorities within this province. But also in some other provinces in China, it could be detecting and combating financial scams.

Ali Rogin:

What does this tell us about the way that Chinese corporations work on behalf of the Chinese government's aims?

Zeyi Yang:

I think this really demystifies a lot of the ideas about the Great Firewall because it seems it's so capable, it has to be built by the government. But in fact, a lot of the things in there can come back to commercialized operations.

Ali Rogin:

Is there anything we can deduce about China's end game here in terms of its geopolitical strategy?

Zeyi Yang:

I think China very much like other countries to adopt a kind of Internet management system that's similar to China's, because one thing we're seeing right now is that countries are taking sides when it comes to how will Internet look like in the next decade.

And China, with its Belt and Road Initiative and with its other big foreign investment projects are trying to get more countries to be on its side. And what Geedge offers, I think is one of the things that other government actually are interested in because a lot of governments want to have more control over what their citizens are seeing. And so this is part of the offer that China can provide to other countries to join their side.

Ali Rogin:

So interesting. Zeyi Yang with WIRED. Thank you so much for joining us.

Zeyi Yang:

Thank you, Ali.