Chinese censorship sprang a major leak on September 11, when researchers confirmed that more than 500GB of internal documents, source code, work logs, and internal communications from the so-called Great Firewall were dumped online, including packaging repos and operational runbooks used to build and maintain China’s national traffic filtering system.
The files appear to originate from Geedge Networks, a company that has long been linked to Fang Binxing — widely described as the “father” of the Great Firewall — and from the MESA lab at the Institute of Information Engineering, a research arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A leaked deployment sheet reveals that the system was rolled out across 26 data centers in Myanmar, with live dashboards monitoring 81 million simultaneous TCP connections. The system was reportedly operated by Myanmar’s state-run telecoms company and integrated into core Internet exchange points, thereby enabling mass blocking and selective filtering.
And it doesn’t stop at Myanmar. Partner reporting from WIRED and Amnesty International reveals that Geedge’s DPI infrastructure has been exported to other states — Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Kazakhstan being among the recipients — where it’s often used alongside lawful intercept platforms. In Pakistan, Geedge’s equipment allegedly forms part of a larger system known as WMS 2.0, which is capable of conducting blanket surveillance on mobile networks in real-time.
The scale and specificity of this leak offer a rare glimpse into how China’s censorship check is engineered and commercialized. WIRED’s reporting also describes how the leaked documents show Geedge’s system can intercept unencrypted HTTP sessions.
