Microsoft ‘digital escorts’ reveal crucial US counterintelligence blind spot

On July 15, 2025, ProPublica published a sweeping investigation revealing that Microsoft had, for nearly a decade, allowed engineers based in China to remotely support sensitive Department of Defense (DoD) cloud systems . The degree to which the arrangement was known within federal agencies that relied on a work-around known as the “digital escort” program, in which US-based personnel with US national security clearances would input commands provided by foreign engineers into Pentagon-linked inf...