New reporting on two large collections of leaked documents sheds light on the trade of surveillance and censorship technology into and out of China. One, by Dake Kang and Yael Grauer for the Associated Press, builds on an initial collection of thousands of documents leaked from Chinese surveillance company Landasoft to demonstrate how “partnership between American firms and the Chinese police laid the groundwork for China’s digital surveillance state as it exists today — the largest and most sophisticated on earth.” The other, by a consortium including Amnesty International and The Globe and Mail, focuses on Geedge Networks, a Chinese technology firm co-founded by “Father of the Great Firewall” Fang Binxing, and its sales of censorship and surveillance systems to countries including Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar.
The AP’s reporting includes the report itself, a collection of detailed findings, an account of the report’s creation, a photo essay showing some of the systems’ victims, and the following short film and summary of key points:
Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
[…] U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed. The AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM in 2009 to design the main policing system for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome. IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”: “ … If older systems are being abused today — and IBM has no knowledge that they are — the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.” Huadi did not respond.
[…] American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them. IBM agents in China sold its i2 software to the Xinjiang police, China’s Ministry of State Security, and many other Chinese police units throughout the 2010s, leaked emails show. One agent, Landasoft, subsequently copied and deployed it as the basis for a predictive policing platform that tagged hundreds of thousands of people as potential terrorists. […] [Source]
James Griffiths, meanwhile, described the content and implications of the Geedge Networks leak at The Globe and Mail:
In July, 2024, a group of Chinese technologists and researchers met at an office in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, to discuss efforts to stop internet users bypassing the Great Firewall, China’s vast online censorship and surveillance apparatus.
Even by Chinese standards, internet controls in Xinjiang are intense, a legacy of a years-long crackdown by the authorities targeting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Preventing people from dodging these controls – to access banned websites or download secure messaging apps – was a key government priority, part of a “long-term struggle and technical confrontation” vital to nationwide “anti-terrorism” efforts, according to minutes of the 2024 meeting.
That record, reviewed by The Globe and Mail, is contained in a leak of more than 100,000 internal documents linked to Geedge Networks, a little-known Chinese company that has quietly assumed a key role in developing the Great Firewall and providing similar censorship capabilities to governments around the world, including in Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan.
The Globe – along with researchers at InterSecLab, Amnesty International, Justice For Myanmar, the Tor Project and reporters at Paper Trail Media – has spent months combing through the leak. The files offer a key insight not only into how Geedge exports cutting-edge censorship technology to its authoritarian clients, giving them capabilities they might not otherwise have, but also into the evolution of the Great Firewall itself. [Source]
This report focuses on a Chinese company, but worth noting the dangers the whole anti-censorship and outsourced-surveillance sector poses to the free and open internet.
Just like the GFW itself, this sector was started by Western tech firms, who are now facing increased Chinese competition.
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— James Griffiths (@jamestgriffiths.com) September 8, 2025 at 10:52 PM
Some Western firms have tried to argue (in private and public) that “better us than them,” but really if international community wants to target the spread of censorship and surveillance online, it should be cracking down on the whole sector and promoting the free and open internet.
— James Griffiths (@jamestgriffiths.com) September 8, 2025 at 10:52 PM
Content from other members of the consortium includes reports from InterSecLab on the documents’ technical content; from Amnesty International on Geedge Networks’ role (alongside several Western companies) in providing censorship and surveillance systems to Pakistan; and from Justice for Myanmar on Geedge’s provision of “unprecedented capabilities to track down, arrest, torture and kill civilians“:
Based on analysis of a leak of more than 100,000 Geedge Networks documents that was shared with InterSecLab, this research sheds light on the features and capabilities of Geedge Networks’ systems, which include deep packet inspection, real-time monitoring of mobile subscribers, granular control over internet traffic, as well as censorship rules that can be tailored to each region. The leak also reveals information about Geedge Networks’ relationship with the academic entity, Mesalab, as well as their interactions with client governments. The implications for data sovereignty are significant, and our findings raise concerns about the commoditization of surveillance and information control technologies. [Source]
Concerns around unlawful surveillance and online censorship in Pakistan are longstanding. Under an oppressive political landscape, [Pakistan]’s legal system offers no real protection against mass surveillance. Domestic laws lack safeguards and those that exist, such as warrant requirements under the Fair Trial Act, are often ignored, while authorities acquire ever more sophisticated surveillance and censorship tools from foreign companies. The purchase of these sophisticated technologies has amplified the country’s capacity to silence dissent, including by targeting journalists, civil society and the public. [Source]
Geedge’s transfer of a commercialised version of China’s “Great Firewall” gives the junta unrestricted access to the online activities of 33.4 million internet users in Myanmar.
Notably, Geedge systems enable the tracking of network traffic at the individual level and can identify the geographic location of mobile subscribers in real time by linking their activity to specific cell identifiers.
By providing hardware, software, training and support to the illegal military junta, Geedge may be aiding and abetting in the commission of crimes against humanity, including the acts of torture and killing, carried out by the junta. [Source]
Read more recent coverage of the global trade in surveillance technology and China’s key role in it via CDT.
