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Microsoft China The Military United States

Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military (reuters.com) 45

Posted by BeauHD from the digital-escorts dept.
Microsoft will stop using China-based engineers to support U.S. military cloud services after a ProPublica report revealed their involvement, prompting backlash from Senator Tom Cotton and a two-week Pentagon review ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In response, Hegseth announced an immediate ban on any Chinese involvement in Department of Defense cloud contracts. Reuters reports: The report detailed Microsoft's use of Chinese engineers to work on U.S. military cloud computing systems under the supervision of U.S. "digital escorts" hired through subcontractors who have security clearances but often lacked the technical skills to assess whether the work of the Chinese engineers posed a cybersecurity threat. [Microsoft] told ProPublica it disclosed its practices to the U.S. government during an authorization process.

On Friday, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw said on social media website X the company changed how it supports U.S. government customers "in response to concerns raised earlier this week ... to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance" for services used by the Pentagon.

Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military More | Reply

Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military

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  • Debt (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 )
    And now it starts.. price increases from paying Americans. You are so desperate to cut the debt that you will wreck education, storm warnings, support for people in medical crisis, the list goes on... Yet you will shoot yourselves in the foot by making enemies out of everyone thus reducing your market down to the most expensive employee there is to support you.

    • What debt cutting are you talking about?

      • Every time Trump spends a day golfing, some millions of pounds are paid to Mar a Lago for the nights spent there by the secret service agents. This considerably reduces his debts. When you consider tax cuts for the 0.01%ers, which also give him huge benefits and a bunch of other similar situations, it's very likely that any debts he had at the beginning of this term will be completely wiped out, along with many of the people paying for them.

  • Who thought Microsoft's use of Chinese engineers to work on U.S. military cloud computing systems was a good idea to start with. China is NOT to be trust ever ! Someone at Microsoft should be fired !

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      Did you read the summary? They're doing this with the permission of the US military. The problem is the subcontractors that they hired to oversee the work actually have no idea what the Chinese engineers are doing because they're too ignorant of the technology being used.

      On an unrelated note, why do you write like Trump?

      • Whoever works for Microsoft and was responsible for the contract should have reported the person in the military that agreed to this to the FBI counterintelligence people. Even if they aren't deliberately trying to destroy the US military, it's criminally negligent.

    • A racist such as me might conjecture that a lot of the people in the decision chain had a Chinese background.

  • But, your M365 instance will continue to be infested by Chinese government contractors being supervised by digital escorts, from India. If they are supervised at all.

    Why? Because fuck you, that's why.

  • quick - blame Trump (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the lefty Dramacrats that /. has become - must be trump' fault for tariffs or something... - come on - blame him

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The lefties are strangely silent. They'll soon crawl out of their burrows and kvetch- it'll just take a bit of time for them to process it, you know, derangement-addled "brains" and all.

      Meanwhile, let's see, who declared China as "Most Favored Nation" status in the 1990s? Who has continued that, especially recently, like 2020-2024?

      Not to contradict myself, but in all fairness we (the West) can learn more about China and their motives by having these deeper ties into their inner workings. A kind of passive s

  • Really? (Score:3)

    by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @07:28AM (#65531054)

    Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military

    They have been doing that? ... Really? ... LOL!!

    • Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military

      Would have thought that NSA's SE Linux work would have had a bigger influence on their tech stack.

    • With the permission of the US military, it seems.

    • Microsoft To Stop Using Engineers In China For Tech Support of US Military

      They have been doing that? ... Really? ... LOL!!

      You aren't kidding. What surprises me is that it is such a well known fact that if you are Chinese, and working for anything involving the US government or military You are reporting everything to the Chinese government.

      I cannot imagine that this is not known to Microsoft. In fact, expect an audit and investigation. Seriously, this would be like the US using German and Japanese support during WW2, and thinking they wouldn't be sharing it with Adolph and Tojo.

  • I worked for the Army for 25 years and we were never allowed to have contractors from other countries. The fact that Microsoft did this just makes me believe Microsoft is even more lousy than I previously thought that they were. Nothing against the Chinese people doing the job, this is all on Microsoft.

    • No. They do it with us military permission. It's the US military that is to blame.

    • I think things have changed and clearly for the worse. I worked for a defense contractor decades ago with a minor clearance. Things like this would have been a no-no for even what I worked on. I recall one guy with a much higher clearance whose wife did not know where he would go when he traveled. He also had annual lie detector/drug testing and periodic deep dives into his financials. What is truly sad is that it appears as if microsoft/dod was shamed into stopping this instead of doing it because, well yo

  • Honestly, I'm surprised that US Military both outsources and offshores IT support.

    Were they doing anything that couldn't have been done with air gap on-prem Proxmox?

    Why are they using Microsoft anyway, if security is a concern, something more SE Linux/Unix, would have been a better design decision for their cloud.

  • I am not surprised (Score:3)

    by TuballoyThunder ( 534063 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @07:39AM (#65531066)
    I don't have a large enough sample size, but the IA people I have dealt who are responsible for the software review process (e.g., review reports from source code analyzers) are not coders and have no idea what the report actually is saying.

    I can see someone making the argument that digital escorts is the same thing as physical escorts, so it is ok. Plus, there is what I call the Princess Bride Effect. You have been told that a process is so robust that it is inconceivable that it could fail.

  • Allegedly this was a permitted practice; but the speed with which they said that they will be abandoning it once it became public knowledge; and the number of federal IT people ProPublica was able to find who had never heard of it, suggests that either the proposal that was approved was not entirely candid about what the plan was; or the approver was too low or obscure to actually approve.

    This certainly wouldn't be the first time that something perfectly on the up and up was abandoned for PR reasons; but

    • Allegedly this was a permitted practice;

      Not merely permitted, it's alleged to have happened by someone working for Insight Global. see also: https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]

    • This certainly wouldn't be the first time that something perfectly on the up and up was abandoned for PR reasons

      The article notes the qualifier "for services used by the Pentagon" which could mean that Microsoft's contracts with other parts of the US government will continue using the program.

      Also, I would hardly consider this "something perfectly on the up and up" since it skirts the security requirements and definitively undermines expectations.

  • The only way to stop this is to entirely cease allowing companies that use contractors and subcontractors on military projects.

    Otherwise what is going to happen is the military will sign a contract with Lockheed who will outsource part of it to IBM who will off-shore part of that to India who will outsource part of that work to another subcontractor who uses people in China and Vietnam.

  • Too late (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday July 19, 2025 @09:26AM (#65531184)

    If they were serious, they would now rebuild everything touched by these people. But it is MS, so this is just a bit of cosmetics over what they did out of unfettered greed.

  • One would start with why wasn't the DOD checking this, Why would MS allow this. Now is every line of code touched by these people being reviwed?

  • Oh, and they stopped using Russian coding experts to program their nuclear missiles.

    Somebody should be fired for not insisting on 100% American support 20 years ago.

  • Is it wise putting military logistics in the ‘Cloud’ or using Signal to discuss your defense policies? :o"
    • FWIW Microsoft has multiple physical clouds in the US, and the military/DOD stuff doesn't share any hardware with the public cloud.
      • This is unlike Google, where they share the hardware and the software and it's up to you to set a policy to enforce data residency in the US.

      • Run from China.

      • > FWIW Microsoft has multiple physical clouds in the US, and the military/DOD stuff doesn't share any hardware with the public cloud.

        Couldn't Microsoft have deep ties to the intelligence services ;)

  • Just stop using Microsoft. Given its track record, Microsoft should have no role in defense. Using Microsoft should be a firing offense, or worse.

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