In mid-September, the global public caught a rare peek under the hood of China’s government internet censorship and digital surveillance, popularly dubbed “The Great Firewall.” Over 500 gigabytes of code, manuals, internal communications, and other documents were anonymously leaked from Geedge Networks, a Chinese security IT company whose products are used by the Chinese government. The leak exposed more than the inner workings of The Great Firewall: it revealed the international sale and export of the surveillance and censorship products that allow other countries to build their own Great Firewalls.
The Geedge leak is exemplary of how the global surveillance and security industry profits off the commodification of stifling political dissent. Information and technology companies package their technologies into an exportable, ready-to-use product that proliferates digital autocracy across governments. The proliferation of such surveillance and policing products place corporate interests before national interests and erode the boundaries of rule of law and national sovereignty.
These companies expand their sphere of influence beyond national borders, profiting off of an international market that undermines sovereignty and human rights. Their geopolitical leverage has spurred the creation of a new hegemony of modern surveillance and repression. The digital security products that governments around the world are purchasing promote an invasive, preemptive monitoring of all subjects regardless of whether or not they are under investigation.
In the case of Geedge, the leaked files reveal how Geedge works alongside China’s foreign policy goals of expanding its soft power through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is China’s pursuit of global economic leverage through infrastructure projects (e.g., roads and ports) meant to facilitate trade and lending money to countries across Africa and Asia. Geedge is able to insert itself as an additional arm of the BRI, allowing the Chinese government to enact similar standards of digital censorship and surveillance within the borders of BRI nations.
The commercial proliferation of The Great Firewall across Asia and Africa has already victimized political opposition, arming countries with the ability to cast a digital dragnet over their people overnight. In the hours following the military coup that deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected party, the military junta had already imposed various means of censoring foreign social media and internet blackouts. By 2022, following the coup, Geedge had sold its systems to the junta, furthering their ability to crack down on dissent. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were blocked along with independent news media. Internet blackouts shuttered the country. Key among the capabilities supplied by Geedge products has been the ability to collect cell IDs to identify and locate mobile phone users, which have been utilized to locate, apprehend, or even kill activists, journalists, and revolutionary forces. Geedge’s cell ID number surveillance technology in Myanmar has led to the apprehension and executions of pro-democracy dissidents Phyo Zeya Thaw and Ko Jimmy.
Myanmar exemplifies how Geedge, working alongside the Chinese government’s international policy goals, has succeeded in the rapid deployment of its product beyond its country’s borders. In Myanmar, it has driven the expansion of power for a military junta known for war crimes and summarily executing dissidents. But corporations that build and sell policing technologies to stifle human rights, democracy, and political dissent thrive in the United States and Europe just as well as they do in the Global South.
Palantir, an American data analytics and software company heavily involved in defense, is similarly expanding its global footprint by exporting policing and military technologies. Their products enable mass blanket surveillance through “predictive-policing,” labeling people as criminals before they even commit a crime.
Palantir Gotham is embedded in police departments across the United States and Europe, relying on sweeping data collection, biometrics, and AI pattern recognition to preemptively target high risk individuals. Civil rights groups—like Germany’s Society for Civil Rights—have raised concerns about how automated mass data processing is unconstitutional, violating telecommunications privacy rights. More infamously, Palantir’s policing and defense products have been used for target identification to commit alleged war crimes by Israel in Gaza and aid the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mass detention of migrants.
With a similar theme of predictive policing, censorship, and data centralization, Geedge’s products work toward comparable goals. Through code, manuals, and internal communications, the Geedge leak demonstrated the intricacy of digital surveillance’s capabilities to blanket screen for dissident behavior. Their products could create databases for “high risk” users, targeting those who use VPNs or identifying users who often change SIM cards.
Geedge and Palantir are far from alone in how they globalize and commodify surveillance. In 2004, US IT firms Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks helped carry out upgrades and maintenance of China’s Great Firewall System. Even tech companies not directly in the market of contracting security services to governments cave and aid autocratic policies across the globe. In 2007, Yahoo gave up journalist Shi Tao’s emails to the Chinese government, leading to his arrest.
The Great Firewall Leak exemplifies how private or semi-private security IT companies expand their global repressive influence with frightening speed and efficacy. Proliferating autocracy across the globe is a profitable endeavor for companies like Geedge and Palantir. They successfully leverage geopolitical dynamics, whether it be the alliance between the United States and Europe or China’s growing influence over the Global South. Leaders instrumentalize these technology networks to perpetuate violence and detentions that have been labeled as human rights violations. Those leading these companies are acutely aware of their nefarious impact; Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO has openly admitted: “Our product is used on occasion to kill people […] I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’” Defense IT companies are more than agents of state demands: They are empowered actors directly putting corporate interests over human rights, rule of law, and national sovereignty.