- The United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegesh
- The system saw Chinese citizens encoding for DOD software suppliers
- Reports called this inherently risky scheme
The United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, ordered a review of the participation of Chinese citizens in the management of cloud services for the Pentagon and the widest army of the USA.
“For almost a decade, Microsoft has used Chinese encoders, remotely supervised by US contractors to support the delicate cloud systems of the Department of Defense, and if you are thinking of the United States first and common sense, this does not happen any of those tests,” Hesgeth said.
The statement comes after a Propublic The report said that the use of Chinese engineers from Microsoft to maintain the computer systems of the Department of Defense with ‘minimum supervision by US personnel’ was’ inherently risky ”, but Microsoft has said that it will soon stop using these engineers based on China for military technical support in the United States.
Digital escorts
These workers were supervised by ‘digital escorts’, which were discovered that they were mainly low -qualification workers and low with very little coding experience.
One of those escorts told him Propublic; “We are trusting that what they are doing is not malicious, but we can’t really say.”
“The use of Chinese citizens for the service department of the defense cloud environments, it ended,” Hegseth continued. “We are requiring a third -party audit of the Microsoft digital escorts program, including the code and presentations of Chinese citizens.”
Not only that, but HEGSETH will also require that the Department of Defense conduct a separate investigation of the digital escort program and Chinese employees of Microsoft involved.
“The program was designed to comply with the hiring rules, but presented the department to an unacceptable risk,” he argued.
“These investigations will help us determine the impact of this digital escort solution. Did they put something in the code that we do not know? We are going to find out.”
In the future, all software providers for the DOD will also have to identify and finish any Chinese participation in DOD systems.
“I am surprised that I am even saying these things, that we allow it to happen, that’s why we are attacking it so hard,” said Hegseth.
