How an off-the-books Microsoft programme gave China a glimpse into Pentagon’s digital nerve centre

Microsoft has been quietly allowing engineers in China to provide support for US Defence Department cloud systems, according to a detailed investigation by ProPublica. For nearly ten years, this arrangement has involved American employees acting as “digital escorts” to input instructions from foreign tech workers into military networks.

These escorts, though cleared for access to government systems, often lack the expertise to detect whether the code they’re running could be malicious.