Leaked files show a Chinese company is exporting the Great Firewall’s censorship technology - The Globe and Mail
9/18/25, 10:43 AM
A screenshot of Geedge Networks's website.
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Geedge’s technology suite has been used by client governments to “supercharge their control apparatus” and provide “unprecedented
surveillance and censorship capabilities,” write researchers at InterSecLab, a digital forensics laboratory that provided key technical
support for the team working on the Geedge leaks.
Geedge did not respond to a detailed list of questions about findings in this article or by The Globe’s publishing partners. China’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cyberspace Administration of China also did not respond.
On its website, Geedge boasts of its technology being used by more than 40 “global service providers,” without naming any country it
works with. Even employee induction materials, contained within the leak, are vague, referring only to projects in “East Africa” and
“South Asia.”
Other documents, however, paint a fuller picture of Geedge’s global footprint.
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After its founding in 2018, one of Geedge’s first clients was the government of Kazakhstan, to whom the company sold its flagship
Tiangou Secure Gateway (TSG), which provides functions similar to China’s own Great Firewall, monitoring and filtering all web traffic
that passes through it, as well as attempts to bypass such censorship.
The same tool has been rolled out in Ethiopia and Myanmar, where it has been instrumental in enabling that country’s military junta
to enforce a ban on VPNs. In many cases, Geedge works with other private companies, including internet service providers (ISPs) such
as Safaricom in Ethiopia, or Frontiir and Ooredoo in Myanmar, to enact government censorship, the documents show. No ISPs that
have partnered with Geedge responded to a request for comment.
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