BREAKING: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announces FULL-SCALE INVESTIGATION into Microsoft's using of Chinese Communist Party-linked engineers to work on US military and Pentagon cloud services.
"Last month, the Department of Defense was made aware of an Obama-Biden era legacy program called "digital escorts." For nearly a decade, Microsoft has used Chinese coders, remotely supervised by U.S. contractors, to support sensitive DoD cloud systems. The program was designed to comply with contracting rules, but it exposed the department to unacceptable risk. I mean, if you're thinking America First and common sense, this doesn't pass either of those tests. So I initiated an immediate review of this vulnerability, and I want to report our initial findings.
"So the use of Chinese nationals to service Department of Defense cloud environmentsit's over. We've issued a formal letter of concern to Microsoft documenting this breach of trust, and we're requiring a third-party audit of Microsoft's digital escort program, including the code and the submissions by Chinese nationals. This audit will be free of charge for U.S. taxpayers.
"I'm also tasking the Department of Defense experts with a separate investigation of the digital escort program and the Chinese Microsoft employees that were involved in it. These investigations will help us determine the impact of this digital escort workaround. Did they put anything in the code that we didn't know about? We're gonna find out.
"Additionally, all Department of Defense software vendors will identify and terminate any Chinese involvement in DoD systems. It blows my mind that I'm even saying these things. It's such common sense that we ever allowed it to happen ..."