Microsoft and the DOD’s Digital Escort Service: How in the World Did This Happen? Chinese engineers accessed Pentagon systems via Microsoft’s cloud—raising alarms over Big Tech’s ties to America’s top adversary. By Thaddeus G. McCotter
“When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” While the statement has been variously (and erroneously) attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and Marx, the point remains as true today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow—if there is a tomorrow for free people and free markets.
In the wake of a disturbing ProPublica investigation, Microsoft executives and the United States Department of Defense (DOD) bureaucrats are busy trying to cover their butts and close the barn door on potential Chinese espionage by fixing the digital escort program. As CNBC reports, “Microsoft on Friday revised its practices to ensure that engineers in China no longer provide technical support to U.S. defense clients using the company’s cloud services.”
While it is too early to determine whether communist China has penetrated the DOD’s classified information stored in its cloud, it is high time to ask, “How in the world did this happen?”
Sure, it is a rhetorical question, but it is helpful to review yet again how the cozy confluence of American multinational corporatists, bureaucrats, and Chinese communists triangulates to imperil our national security.
To begin, a cursory sketch of the digital escort program, per Breitbart:
The ProPublica report revealed that Chinese-based Microsoft engineers had been helping maintain Defense Department computer systems, potentially exposing sensitive military data to cybersecurity risks. The report revealed that Microsoft’s Chinese Azure engineers were overseen by “digital escorts” in the U.S., who typically had less technical expertise than the employees they managed overseas.
Specifically, again per Breitbart:
A China-based Microsoft engineer submits a digital “ticket” to perform maintenance. A U.S.-based escort picks up the ticket. The two meet virtually, where the engineer relays commands for the escort to input into the federal cloud system, without the escort necessarily understanding the code. This provides an opening to potentially insert malicious code that goes undetected.
Allowing the people of communist China, where laws mandate that people of all walks of life—including tech— collude in its cyber espionage or else, access to our DOD systems sounds insane. And it is. But there is a cold, hard illogic at work: money.
Microsoft was afraid of falling behind its cloud storage competitors when the U.S. government began soliciting Big Tech corporations to handle its billions of dollars of business. Microsoft had a liability. No, it was not that Americans could not do the same work as the corporation’s Chinese workers; it was that the American workers were too expensive. What to do?
Enter the digital escort service.
Though having no qualms with discriminating against American workers because they cost too much, Microsoft applied a DEI-like rationalization that it would be wrong to distinguish based upon nationality between its roster of international employees.
Next, Microsoft convinced DOD bureaucrats that an American escort, who was likely abjectly untrained in detecting cyber espionage (if they were tasked with even looking for it), would suffice to protect American national security from the captive people of our avowed enemy.
Microsoft’s successful argument to the DOD bureaucrats? That’s because the DOD did not know the “provenance” of who from what country was working on many of their tech issues. Why should this case be any different?
Now, if you had responded by ensuring that the DOD knew every single one of the people working on its tech issues, you could never be a government bureaucrat. (Consider yourself blessed.)
But you could be the Secretary of Defense: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the architecture as ‘a legacy system created over a decade ago, during the Obama administration,’ and deemed it ‘obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment.’” The current DOD has vowed to “review its systems to identify any similar activities and take necessary actions to ensure the security of its cloud services.”
On its part, Microsoft “remain(s) committed to providing the most secure services possible to the US government, including working with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols as needed.” Is this a case of them having an epiphany about protecting national security? Perhaps, but it is undoubtedly also concerned about market share: “This change primarily affects Microsoft’s Azure cloud services division, which analysts estimate generates more than 25 percent of the company’s revenue, making it larger than Google Cloud but smaller than Amazon Web Services.”
There is no indication that the communist Chinese regime intends to cease its cyber espionage against the United States.
It is unknown if Microsoft and the DOD are closing the barn door on communist China’s cyber espionage in time. What is known is that the continuing and chummy relationship between America’s Big Tech and government bureaucrats in the face of communist China’s unrestricted warfare augurs ill for our national security, though it does bode well for those selling the rope to hang us all.
In the short run, anyway.
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