Did I miss it, but what do these "digital escorts" actually do. The article doesn't seem to actually explain it.
Edit: It's people who watch over what foriegn engineers are doing.
Edit: It's people who watch over what foriegn engineers are doing.
> U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage
It sounds like you may have additional context or perspective, which makes me curious about the scope of "instructs." For example, I can imagine that the deployment sources of the public and Government clouds infrastructure are different, such that a bug fix on the shared base may need to be merged between these two branches. If a foreign national made the fix for the public version and then provided the expertise of resolving merge conflicts when applying it to the Government version, it presents an opportunity for subtle abuse unless the change is either further audited by the keyboard operator or another engineer before the merge result lands or is deployed.
As far at I'm aware, there isn't a separate code base.
In general, you can't share scripts / executables via this mechanism - that's done via code review and deployment.
You could get an operator to run a script in a malicious way, but it'd need pre-written to include the malicious behaviour.
Edit: yes it does, I just didn't read it all the way.
> A Microsoft engineer in China files an online “ticket” to take on the work.
> A U.S.-based escort picks up the ticket.
> The engineer and the escort meet on the Microsoft Teams conferencing platform.
> The engineer sends computer commands to the U.S. escort, presenting an opportunity to insert malicious code.
> The escort, who may not have advanced technical expertise, inputs the commands into the federal cloud system.
Basically, stockholders get another yacht, national security gets screwed.