Western Companies' Crucial Role in Building China's Great Firewall

The Great Firewall of China is the most sophisticated mass censorship weapon ever created, a gargantuan digital cruncher that controls the information flow to 1.3 billion people.

But China alone could not have put this cyber-bunker together without the inestimable assistance of scores of Western technology corporations, who are not only adding and abetting the Chinese censors. They are also cheering for them during the commercial breaks of Olympic broadcasts.

Dmitri Vitaliev, writing for Comment Is Free, The Guardian's China blog, details the who's is who and what is what of this giant press freedom herbicide.

Much more than your standard internet filtering gateway, the Great Firewall comprises an administrative collaboration of seven government ministries, unrestricted access to numerous public record databases, closed circuit television footage with built-in facial recognition systems, as well as the more well-known information surveillance and censorship technology.

Software and hardware purchased from around the world continue to tighten the screws of a digital information society. Network control and optimization, intrusion detection and other security features promised in the product brochures of western IT firms are put to use against the rights to privacy and freedom of an entire populace.

Vitaliev goes on to list the most salient pieces of software that compose the building blocks of the firewall, including the nationalities of the Internet companies that produced them, including Dutch, American and Israeli.

XSGuard Management System: purchased from the Els Shield (Shanghai) Information Technology Co Ltd, network management software developed in the Netherlands. It allows for monitoring of network packets and performing digital forensics.

Cisco 4125 Intrusion Detection System: purchased from Cisco China and used for monitoring activity on the T1 subnet. Other items sold include the ASA 5505, which "provides intelligent threat defense and secure communications services that stop attacks before they impact business continuity."

YangNet Police Network Intrusion Detection System: purchased from the Bright Oceans Corporation in China. According to their (badly translated) website, the product "acts in a transparent based on a URL filtering and text content filtering, shielding bad, illegal site, on the conduct of fine-grained web content filtering and the precise control and prevent all internal net users to browse the cult, pornography and other undesirable foreign websites and webpages. This feature is suitable for primary and secondary schools, tertiary institutions, government, business and professional applications."

Radware DefensePro 2000: an Israeli technology organization; in this case, the product offers an "Adaptive Decision Engine: behavior-based, self-learning mechanism proactively scans for anomalous network, server and client traffic patterns ... and is designed for enterprise core and perimeter deployment, data centers, university campuses and carrier backbones."

All of them, and many more, attended what can be called the world's largest Internet censorship exhibit, Security China 2000.

It was sponsored by the Chinese Public Security Bureau, the ministry in charge of policing the internet. The meeting was attended by US-based Lucent, Sun Microsystems and Cisco, European wireless giants Nokia and Ericsson, and Canada's Nortel Networks, among many others. The main event was China's Golden Shield Project – an ambitious plan to link China's national and internet surveillance networks, public record databases, CCTV cameras, speech and face recognition databases, smart cards, credit records and a myriad of regional and national ministries. Their mission was to make the network "see, hear and think" in the continuing effort to solidify state control.

And this control is effected by a security system that "thinks," identifying voice, facial features and personal preferences, which are stored in hundreds of millions of individual profiles. In other words, you are assigned a personal police record even if you are a law-abiding, unsuspecting Internet user.

Content requested from a home computer for topics deemed undesirable will be stored against that person's personal file in numerous databases. The network rolled out with product and knowledge support from western IT firms is designed to think – that is, to identify individual subscribers when they log on, matching names to IP addresses, and learning, over time, what interests them.

One of the Chinese censors' most notorious vendor is Cisco Systems, which helped create the cyber-dragnet that that has caught so many dissidents.

An enthusiastic business partner of the Chinese state apparatus has been Cisco. Notorious for its several appearances before the US House of Representatives to explain their role in supplying virtually the entire hardware on which the Golden Shield Project operates, as well as multiple systems to assist Chinese ministries responsible for catching political and social dissidents and censoring the internet. In 1997, Cisco won the contract to supply internet "firewall boxes" and, by 2006, they supplied 60% of the Chinese market for routers, switches and other sophisticated networking gear. Its estimated annual revenue from China is $500m.

Censorship business is booming at the expense of the fundamental rights of the world's most populous country.