Geedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak
10 comments
·September 13, 2025miohtama
Some analysis and discussion here:
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/519
> 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.
> 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.
> At least one Jira support ticket shows evidence of plaintext capture of email
miohtama
[dead]
nromiun
AFAIK QUIC traffic is impossible to attack using MITM techniques. So I wonder how the GFW handles it. Do they block it entirely or still filter it somehow?
FridayoLeary
My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls. To be honest i still don't think it's a goal anyone is actively working towards and that's a bit of an hyperbolic take. But the truth is that we are moving more towards such a system then we are moving away.
My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent. We are lucky to be living in such a free society. Internet seems to be losing the battle against government interference and censorship and that is more of a bad thing then a good thing.
physicsguy
I listened to a British politics podcast the other day called Not Another One and they were discussing that among western governments there is some looking at the UK’s porn block because in general politicians think that things have gone too far in children being able to access to extreme content, and that if 20 years ago it had been suggested this had been where we’d be, it wouldn’t have been seen as acceptable. They used the example that if you want to publish a very explicit book in the U.K., the Obscene Publications Acts would put limits on you doing so, but putting it online would be allowed
userbinator
would copy this to build their own Firewalls.
Just about every company already uses some form of this on their network, especially those in highly regulated sectors like banking and other finance-related industries.
More usefully and perhaps "on the other side", I have a proxy on my network to block and modify requests for ads and other content I want to "censor".
nromiun
There is a big difference between a firewall on a private network and another on an entire country's traffic.
jychang
> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.
Well, OpenAI and other companies training AI models have shown that the architecture of the model matters less than the quality of data fed into it. Same might apply for humans.
I understand that the Great Firewall is mostly about censoring dissent, but it's also to keep Chinese citizens away from junk food media sources. The type of videos you see on Douyin vs Tiktok is a great example of the difference.
Yes, the videos on Douyin are politically censored, but they're also a lot less brainrot than Tiktok videos. The Tiktok algo is optimized for ad impressions and profit, whereas the Douyin algo is more tuned to some nebulous concept of Confucian social harmony, for better or worse.
A more nuanced take is that I don't think it's useful to measure Chinese govt behavior just mapped to "amount of suppressing political dissent". I actually think the level of censorship is above the level required for that. It's more useful to recognize that "suppressing political dissent" is actually a subset of "promote social harmony"- which is not strongly valued in the USA but is at least important enough to be paid lip service in China- and I suspect a big chunk of educated members of government may truly believe in that ideal. It explains behaviors like "why the Douyin algo is so different from Tiktok" and other overreaches of the Chinese govt, because it's not solely about suppressing dissent.
supriyo-biswas
> My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls
Various western networking companies already sell such products to authoritarian regimes, such as Nokia[1], Blue Coat Systems[2] and Siemens[3]. China, for reasons that are well documented elsewhere, has always wanted to build it with "their tech", the only thing that's new to me is their export of such tech to Chinese-allied nations.
> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.
This is a very controversial opinion, but the overton window has shifted in this respect and many people often like censorship/DPI when done for "altruistic reasons", and it was sad to see Europeans (presumably) asking for blocking of social media sites since Nepal[4] had done the same, disregarding the second-order effects it would have.
Of course, we live in interesting times, with a major western world power embracing economic policies that prioritize government ownership of industries[5], which is typically closer to communism than anything we've seen in the past :)
[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/08/nokia-siemens-spy-systems
[2] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/about-bis/102-about-bis/ne...
[3] https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/ard-reports-si...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137363
[5] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
null
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/chinas-great-fire...
https://x.com/gfw_report/status/1966669581302309018