GreatFire (GreatFire.org) is a website[note 1] that monitors the status of websites censored by the
Great Firewall of China[2] and helps Chinese Internet users circumvent the
censorship and blockage of websites in China.[3][4] The site was first launched in 2011 by an anonymous trio.[5] GreatFire is funded by sources inside and outside China, including the US-government-backed
Open Technology Fund.[6][7]
GreatFire hosts a testing system that allows visitors to test in real time the accessibility of a website from various locations within China. The organization's stated mission was to "bring transparency to the Great Firewall of China."[8] GreatFire also provides another test system, Blocky, which allows users to search for online services and check their status.[9]
GreatFire has worked with
BBC to make the Chinese-language BBC website available to users in China, despite it being blocked by the Great Firewall, by using a method known as
collateral freedom[10] that mirrored content on widely used
content delivery networks, such as
Amazon CloudFront and
CloudFlare, so that it would be too economically costly for censors to block.[11][12][13] The organization has since set up similar mirror sites for other blocked websites, such as
Google and the New York Times, with a directory of links hosted on
GitHub.[14]
For security reasons, the members of the organization remain anonymous and do not know much about each other to prevent the whole project from coming down in the event one would be caught by the Chinese government.[15]
GreatFire has been targeted with
distributed denial-of-service attacks that attempt to take down the website by overloading its servers with traffic.[16] In April 2015 it was targeted by a Chinese
attack tool named
Great Cannon that redirected massive amounts of Internet traffic to servers used by GreatFire.[17]
In 2015, the
Associated Press reported that GreatFire receives funding from a variety of sources, including the
Open Technology Fund (OTF), a
United States government-backed program.[6] The Open Technology Fund says on its website that it gave Greatfire.org a $114,000 grant in 2014.[19] On its website, the organization identifies GreatFire as an "OTF-supported" initiative.[7]
^The website declares itself as a "non-profit organization." However, there is no evidence provided to support this claim, nor is there third-party evidence that it is registered in any jurisdiction.