A Trove of internal documents disclosed from a little -known Chinese company fell the curtain on how digital censorship tools are marketed and exported worldwide. Geedge Networks sells which is equivalent to a “large firewall” marketed with at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. The revolutionary flight shows in the granular details of the capacities that this company must 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 something that documents demonstrate: while people often consider China’s great firewall as a unique and all-powerful government system unique to China, the real process of developing and maintaining it works in the same way as surveillance technology in the West. GEEDGE collaborates with university research and development establishments, adapts its commercial strategy to meet the needs of different customers and even reuse the remaining infrastructure of its competitors. In Pakistan, for example, Geedge won a contract to work with and then replaced the equipment manufactured by the Canadian Sandvine company, according to the disclosed files.
By coincidence, another leak from another Chinese company published this week reinforces the same point. Monday, researchers from Vanderbilt University made a document of 399 pages of Golaxy, a Chinese company that uses AI to analyze social media and generate propaganda equipment. The disclosed documents, which include internal terraces, commercial objectives and meeting notes, can come from an old dissatisfied employee – the last two pages accuse Golaxy of having mistreated workers in sub -paid them and by obliging long hours. The document had been seated on the Internet open for months before another researcher reported it to Brett Goldstein, research teacher at the Vanderbilt engineering school.
Golaxy’s main cases are different from that of Geedge: it collects open source of social media, cartaque relations between political figures and press organizations, and pushes targeted online stories through synthetic profiles of social media. In the disclosed document, Golaxy claims to be the “number one brand in the analysis of intelligence megadonts” in China, serving three main customers: the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government and the Chinese army. The technological demos included focuses sharply on geopolitical problems such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and the US elections. And unlike Geedge, Golaxy seems to target only national government entities as customers.
But there are also a lot of things that make the two comparable companies, in particular in terms of the operation of their activities. According to the nature index, the main research institution affiliated with the Chinese Academy (CAS), the main research institution affiliated with the government. And they both market their services to Chinese government agencies at the provincial level, which have localized problems they wish to monitor and budgets to spend on surveillance and propaganda tools.
Golaxy did not immediately respond to a request for wired comments. In a previous response to the New York Times, the company denied data collection targeting US officials and called the disinformation of the reports of the point of sale. Vanderbilt researchers say they have seen the company delete pages from your website after the initial reports.
Closer than they seem
In the West, when academics see opportunities to market their advanced research, they often become founders of startups or start -up companies. Golaxy does not seem to be an exception. According to the document disclosed, many key researchers from the company still occupy places in case.
But there is no guarantee that researchers in the case will obtain government subsidies – just like a public university professor in the United States cannot bet on their federal contracts in startup. Instead, they must take care of government agencies like any private enterprise that would go after customers. A document in the leak shows that Golaxy awarded sales targets to five employees and aimed to secure 42 million RMB (approximately $ 5.9 million) in contracts with Chinese government agencies in 2020. Another 2021 calculation sheet lists the current business customers, who included branches of the Chinese military target, state security and provincial police departments, that other potential customers that it was targeted.
