Leaked files show a Chinese company is exporting the Great Firewall’s censorship technology - The Globe and Mail 9/18/25, 10:43 AM the means of circumventing such controls, from VPNs to specialized tools such as Tor, software most widely used for accessing the dark web. The leaks show employees at the company working to reverse-engineer many popular tools and find means of blocking them. One set of documents lists nine commercial VPNs as “resolved,” and provides various means of identifying and filtering traffic to them. Similar capabilities have long been demonstrated by the Great Firewall, with most commercial VPNs inaccessible from within China and many dedicated anti-censorship tools also hard to access. Keith McManamen, a strategic analyst at Toronto-based Psiphon, which provides a free VPN to users in countries where the internet is censored, said authoritarian regimes have long invested in means of “fingerprinting our traffic.” “We have a history of battling the censors in some of the most dire spaces online,” he said. SUBSCRIBE Leaked files show a Chinese company is exporting the Great Firewall’s censorship technology A vendor uses a mobile phone as he waits for customers at a market in Lahore, Pakistan, in July. Companies, including many Western tech firms,FROM have $0.99/WEEK enabled authoritarian regimes to filter and block online traffic for decades. ARIF ALI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES After the 2021 Myanmar coup, the documents show Geedge developed a tool to detect which servers Psiphon’s app connected to, enabling them to be blocked nationwide. Access to Psiphon was highly limited from June, 2024, to March, 2025, according to data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference. Mr. McManamen said that despite this, during the worst of the internet disruptions in Myanmar, Psiphon actually gained users, as “although our tool was being hit hard, other tools were being hit equally hard if not harder.” Commercial VPNs are often the first circumvention methods to fail, as they do not generally invest in anti-censorship technology. But free tools such as Psiphon or Tor are highly dependent on support from grants and donors, a situation that has been complicated in https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-leaked-files-show-a…de&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer Page 6 of 9