US lawmaker presses for details of Pentagon use of Chinese engineers under Microsoft deal

PHOTO CAPTION: Illustrative photo by BoliviaInteligente via Unsplash

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO  -  A U.S. lawmaker on Thursday pressed the U.S. Defense Department for further details on what information the U.S. military shared with Chinese engineers as part of a cloud computing services contract with Microsoft.

After a report by investigative journalism publication ProPublica, Microsoft last week said it has ended the practice of using China-based engineers to provide technical support to the U.S. military under the supervision of U.S. "digital escorts" who may not have had the expertise to assess whether the work was a cybersecurity threat.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a two-week review to ensure other contractors were not employing the same practices.

In a letter seen by Reuters, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, asked Hegseth to provide details to lawmakers on what information Chinese engineers accessed and to disclose "the discovery of potential security incidents or malicious events that have already occurred or are likely to occur."

In addition, Cotton asked whether Microsoft had been required to perform self-audits of the program and if so, the results of those audits.

"While I applaud your actions, I am concerned that the Department (of Defense) is hampered by agreements and practices unwisely adopted by your predecessors, including contracts and oversight processes that fail to account for the growing Chinese threat," Cotton wrote in the letter.

 (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Christopher Cushing // REUTERS)