Possible Vulnerabilities of PostQuantum Cryptography to Attacks with Physics Beyond the Standard Model

What if our newest "quantum-resistant" cryptographic standards are vulnerable to neglected physics at the intersection of quantum and classical approaches and physics beyond the standard model?

I want to walk you through something I've been thinking about since I was a student of Fields Medalist Richard Borcherds at UC Berkeley. Borcherds specializes in lattice mathematics and string theory, and he is famous for solving the monstrous moonshine conjecture. Sitting in his classes planted a seed that has grown into what I think is one of the more uncomfortable questions in modern security research.

Presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSqeYz8Wh-Q

The setup

Most security professionals know the basic story. Quantum computers are coming. They will eventually break the cryptographic primitives we rely on today. In response, NIST has been standardizing what we call post-quantum cryptography, and back in 2018 (when I happened to be visiting Boulder, Colorado) they put out the first round of candidates supposed to be resilient to both quantum and classical attacks.

Here is the part people gloss over. That resilience has never been fully proven. It is a strong conjecture, not a theorem.

The cryptographic community got a sharp reminder of that when one of the candidates, SIKE (supersingular isogeny key encapsulation), was cracked in about 62 minutes on a standard Intel CPU. Not a quantum computer. A standard CPU.

Most of the surviving post-quantum schemes lean on what are called lattice problems, and specifically on the difficulty of the Shortest Vector Problem over a high-dimensional lattice, or its close geometric cousin, the non-commutative torus. The bet is that finding the shortest vector in that kind of structure is computationally infeasible for any classical or quantum attacker.

My own bias has always been that any claim of truly unbreakable encryption is too hubristic a request to make of the universe. Nature has a long track record of collapsing our strongest assumptions when we get too confident. So I have been looking for where the next surprise might come from.

The bridge nobody is crossing

What I have come to believe is that there is an entire class of physics, sitting at the intersection of classical and quantum (sometimes called physics beyond the standard model) that has gone almost completely unexamined as an attack surface.

To see why this matters, you have to notice some strange coincidences in the literature.

The NP-hard Shortest Vector Problem turns out to be deeply related to the so-called Learning With Errors problem, which is the same mathematical structure researchers use to understand how the brain efficiently performs the equivalent of backpropagation. Approximate-SVP and Learning With Errors are tightly linked through Regev's reduction. Some neuroscientists have proposed that LWE-like structures appear in cortical computation. It is also related to the perceptual binding problem, which is the question of how the brain stitches sensory features into a unified, coherent experience.

The perceptual binding problem has been mapped to the Shortest Vector Problem in published work by researchers like Tsotsos, where alternative theories like predictive coding have their own issues. Brain neural networks have been mapped to high-dimensional lattices and non-commutative tori in academic literature by groups like the Blue Brain Project. And here is where it gets stranger. The Shortest Vector Problem has also been tied to the black hole information paradox, because that paradox is essentially a cryptographic question. Information flows one way across the event horizon, but quantum theory demands unitarity, so the information must somehow escape in scrambled form.

So you have three NP-hard problems that look identical at the level of mathematical structure in the same universality class. Post-quantum cryptography. The brain's binding of conscious experience. The black hole information paradox. If they really are equivalent, then any physics that resolves one of them is in principle physics that breaks the other two.

What if we used neurons?

In theory, you could take a culture of biological neurons, stimulate them to encode a particular lattice problem (which Hamiltonian engineering can in fact do), and then read out the shortest vector by spectral analysis. Studying the physics of how this works might also shed light on the black hole information paradox.

How do you actually retrieve the shortest vector from a culture of neurons? The answer involves a layer of biology underneath the neural network itself.

Microtubules, biophotons, and the spectral readout

Inside neuronal cytoskeletons there are long cylindrical proteins called microtubules. Mounting evidence suggests they host topologically protected fermionic spin states. This matters because the brain runs on roughly 20 W of power, which is preposterously efficient compared to the supercomputers that some of our tech leaders now want to power with their own dedicated nuclear power plants. Pure electrochemical signaling cannot account for that efficiency. Something more is going on.

The picture I find compelling is that microtubules host entangled networks of these fermionic spin states distributed across the tissue. These networks are driven toward saturation, and at a critical phase transition the information stored in those entanglements gets bosonized into light-like modes. In experiments this looks like superradiant cascades of ultra-weak Majorana-like vortex biophotons, biophotons that carry a quantum property called orbital angular momentum, and that orbital angular momentum is the carrier of the information previously held in the spin states.

Light with angular orbital momentum (OAM) carries the necessary information required to encode high-dimensional lattice problems. Majorana-like vortex photons carry this OAM property in a feedforward and feedbackwards way that makes decoding lattice problems possible.

At critical points, those superradiant cascades might broadcast error backpropagation across the brain tissue, which would account for perceptual binding. There are experiments showing the cascades exist, and that light can indeed modulate long-term potentiation and long-term depression in neuron cells.

The picture I am sketching would imply that the lattice geometry is in some sense readable from the spectrum of the emitted photons. Whether that readout is computationally efficient, that is, whether it actually solves SVP rather than just exposing it, is a separate and much harder question. Standard quantum complexity (BQP not believed to contain NP) suggests that no physical readout, classical or quantum, gets SVP for free. An efficient attack along these lines would require either new complexity-theoretic franeworks or physics genuinely outside the standard model.

Frameworks in math, physics, and computer science have required modifications before to accommodate new discoveries, however, and the suggestions here do warrant further study.

If this picture is right, then in principle you should be able to extract the shortest vector over your encoded lattice space by doing spectral analysis on this light. The shortest vector should show up as the smallest non-zero eigenvalue. Recent work has also shown that orbital angular momentum light is capable of storing information about exactly the kind of high-dimensional lattice geometries you would need.

Parity-Sector Signatures in Ultraweak Photon Emission from Driven-Dissipative Majorana Spin Systems | IPI Letters

The evidence has been quietly piling up

Experiments with xenon anesthetics that block microtubule channels showed that the specific isotope of xenon used modulated anesthetic potency. Different isotopes differ in nuclear spin, not chemistry. That is a strong hint that the quantum property of spin is implicated in the way the brain processes information, via what is called the radical pair mechanism.

We also know, fairly confidently at this point, that the brain's speed and efficiency cannot be fully accounted for by electrochemical signaling alone, and that information is non-locally distributed across the tissue in a way very unlike a von Neumann architecture.

Studies of microtubules have found resonance frequency peaks across scales that are consistent with conformal field theories, and even time-crystalline behaviors, both of which could be implicated in how microtubules facilitate backpropagation. The picture is that fermionic, possibly Majorana-like spin states are hosted within the hydrophobic pockets of microtubules, the information gets bosonized into superradiant cascades, and the microtubules themselves act as optical waveguides.

Microtubule theories of consciousness or brain function have historically been criticized because they sometimes invoke what seem like bizarre ideas of quantum gravity or macroscopic quantum entanglement, and they do not appear to be viable based on the physics most of us were taught. Newer investigations push back on those assumptions. A whole emerging field called quantum biology now points to under-examined quantum effects being necessary to explain things like cellular signaling, photosynthesis, avian navigation, olfaction, and even patterns in human decision-making that look more like quantum interference than classical probability.

Tegmark's 2000 decoherence criticism of Orch-OR was directly rebutted by Hagan, Hameroff, and Tuszyński in Phys Rev E (2002), who argued he modeled the wrong system (24 nm separations versus the smaller ones Orch-OR actually proposes) and ignored shielding mechanisms like Debye counterion layers, ordered water, and lattice-based error correction; their recalculation extended decoherence times by seven orders of magnitude, though still short of the 25 ms target. Subsequent experimental work, especially Babcock et al. 2024 demonstrating UV superradiance across tryptophan mega-networks in microtubules, plus xenon nuclear-spin anesthesia studies and the broader quantum biology field, has chipped further at the "warm-wet-noisy means impossible" framing without actually proving Orch-OR.

On the Penrose-Diósi side, Donadi et al. 2021 (Nature Physics) ruled out only the natural parameter-free version of the model using Gran Sasso germanium detectors, leaving regularized versions with larger R₀ alive; however, the 2024 follow-up by Figurato et al. showed that closing the remaining gap would require 18 orders of magnitude better experimental sensitivity, which is brutal but not strictly a falsification, and dissipative variants and alternative gravitational collapse models remain on the table. Some forms of structured OAM light like what are called "Hopfions" can preserve quantum properties at scale. Additional work on quantum chaos or topological protection might close the gap.

The mathematics behind all of this lives in some surprisingly familiar places. Twistor theory describes null light geodesics. Einstein-Cartan theory describes spacetime torsion along those geodesics. In string theory, the information carried by light with orbital angular momentum is sometimes called "soft hair" and shows up as one theoretical angle for resolving the black hole information paradox.

The transition of information from fermionic spin entanglements (sometimes called hidden islands of entanglement entropy in the literature) into light-like modes in superradiant cascades can be described with Z2 orbifolds. The behavior at the phase transitions can be described using the Riemann zeta function. There have been recent studies that managed to replicate the zeros of the Riemann zeta function by periodically driving qubits, in models that explicitly link the zeta function to the behavior of Majorana spin states in curved spacetimes, which can be simulated in those environments. Both of these point at a possible resolution to the Hilbert-Polya conjecture, which speculates that the Riemann zeta zeros might eventually be observed as the energy levels of a real quantum physical system. Separately, the Riemann zeta function has been linked to macroscopic quantum-like physics in fluid turbulence, quantum chaos, and phase transitions in nonlinear systems.

There are also adjacent experimental approaches that get at the Shortest Vector Problem from a different angle, including spin glasses and folded spectrum methods.

Penrose and Hameroff's model says the phase transition I keep describing is facilitated by gravity itself. At the critical point, macroscopic quantum superpositions and entanglements of those spin states saturate a complexity bound, possibly forming what are called Frohlich condensates, after which the information stored in those entanglement islands or entanglement wedges is discharged in what they call an objective reduction event, broadcast through the superradiant cascade. That cascade is the macroscopic quantum-like behavior, and the gravitational feedback adjusts dendritic weights, which is to say, it facilitates learning in the neural network. This is supposed to be the resolution to the measurement problem and an explanation for why we do not observe the world around us in superposition. Whether that holds up is going to take more experiments.

It is also conceivable that the information about a black hole interior may escape encoded in a similar fashion, printed on light with orbital angular momentum, in which case spectral analysis is the right experimental tool there too.

Here is what I want every security professional reading this to sit with for a moment.

Your trust in post-quantum cryptography rests on the assumption that nobody can find an efficient way to solve the Shortest Vector Problem. The mathematical literature already links that problem to two phenomena (the brain's binding of experience, and the black hole information paradox) that are subjects of active investigation by top scientists, major corporations, and governments. They are taking it seriously. You might think it is a fringe theory. You are free to think that. But you might also be left behind.

Even if every specific claim I have made above turns out to be wrong, the underlying point stands. There is a road map here for a class of attack on post-quantum cryptography that does not look anything like a classical attack or a standard quantum attack. That alone should be fuel for healthy skepticism toward the marketing language around "quantum-resistant" anything, and toward the viability of the AI architectures we are currently betting the global economy on.

A closing thought on AI

I will end somewhere that might surprise you. The same physics has implications for the current AI boom. If the brain's efficiency relative to our silicon really is a story about microtubule-hosted spin states and bosonized light, then the next breakthroughs in artificial intelligence may not come from scaling up data centers powered by Manhattan-sized nuclear plants and launched into orbit, which some of our tech leaders are now openly proposing. Sort of a crazy idea when you say it out loud. It also may not come from gold-plated nanowires at milliKelvin temperatures.

It might come from a deeper understanding of what makes us human, of how our brains work, and of how that physics extends through our relationships and into our communities.

It might, in other words, be more economical to invest directly in people than in data centers.

That is the conclusion I keep arriving at. I think it is worth taking seriously.

Theoretical Approaches to Solving the Shortest Vector Problem in NP-Hard Lattice-Based Cryptography with Post-SUSY Theories of Quantum Gravity in Polynomial Time by Orch-Or | IPI Letters

Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre–Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes

My new computational study maps the OAM scattering channel of Kerr in painstaking detail. Here is what it found, why it matters, and where it falls short.

Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre–Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes

https://zenodo.org/records/19830674

Presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgYcBmSQVs

So here is something that might surprise you if you have not thought about it before: light can be twisted.

Not in the polarization sense, where the electric field rotates as the wave moves. Something deeper. The phase fronts of a beam (the surfaces of constant phase, the things that look like rippling sheets in a textbook diagram) can wind around the beam's propagation axis like a corkscrew. The number of times they wind is an integer, it is conserved as the beam propagates through empty space, and it is called the topological charge. Physicists also call it orbital angular momentum, or OAM. A pulse of OAM light is sometimes called a vortex photon.

Allen and collaborators worked this out in a famous 1992 paper, and OAM has since become a real workhorse in optics labs. People use it for high-bandwidth communication, quantum information protocols, and, more recently, astronomy.

Which brings us to the question. What happens to a twisted beam of light when it scatters off a spinning black hole? Could it be possible that the missing information from the black hole information paradox might be encoded on OAM modes or light?

That is what this new preprint submitted to Physical Review D. sets out to approach in quantitative detail. And the answer turns out to be more interesting than either "nothing" or "the black hole eats the twist."

The seed for this whole line of inquiry is a 2011 Nature Physics paper by Tamburini, Thidé, Molina-Terriza, and Anzolin. They argued that a Kerr (rotating) black hole should imprint OAM on light passing through its near-zone, because of frame dragging. Spacetime around a spinning black hole literally rotates with the hole, and that rotation should leave a signature on the phase structure of any light that gets close.

If true, this opens up a tantalizing observational possibility. The Event Horizon Telescope and its planned successor, the next-generation EHT, are imaging the photon rings of supermassive black holes like M87* and Sgr A*. If those photon rings carry distinctive OAM signatures tied to the central black hole's spin, an OAM-resolved measurement could become a new probe of the geometry, complementary to standard imaging.

But the 2011 prediction was qualitative. Geometric optics. Order-of-magnitude.

The paper does the boring, hard, necessary thing: it computes the actual scattering, in the full-wave Teukolsky regime, on a 5,250-point grid covering most of the physically relevant parameter space (spin, frequency, input topological charge). And then it asks four very specific questions about what falls out.

Question one: does the twist survive?

The first thing I do is check whether the topological charge of the incident beam matches the topological charge of the outgoing scattered field.

Across all 4,985 grid points where the calculation converges, the deviation between input and output topological charge is at the floating-point machine precision floor. Median deviation: zero. Maximum deviation: about 1.78×10−151.78 \times 10^{-15} 1.78×10−15, which is just numerical noise from double-precision arithmetic.

In other words, twisted light stays twisted. If you send in a beam with topological charge 5, you get back a scattered field with topological charge 5. The black hole does not break the twist.

This is not actually a discovery so much as a certification. The Kerr metric has an axial Killing vector (it is symmetric under rotations around the spin axis), and the scattering equations decompose into modes labeled by a discrete azimuthal quantum number. So azimuthal phase winding is preserved analytically by the structure of the problem. What the calculation shows is that no convention error or implementation bug has crept in to break this property numerically. It is a sanity check on the numerical pipeline, not a physical finding. Azimuthal symmetry guarantees this analytically, so a deviation would have indicated a convention or implementation bug rather than new physics.

Some prior speculative work has suggested vorticity-shifting effects in strong-field gravitational interactions. This calculation is silent on those proposals, since they require breaking axial symmetry or going beyond classical single-frequency scattering. Within the regime the paper studies (axisymmetric, single-frequency, classical electromagnetic scattering), no such shift exists.

Question two: does the energy stay in one mode?

Here is where it gets more interesting. The topological charge is preserved, but that is just the integer that labels the helical phase. It does not say anything about how the energy of the beam is distributed across the spheroidal multipole tower.

I track the centroid of the OAM spectrum, written ⟨l⟩\langle l \rangle ⟨l⟩, which is the first moment of the mode-mixing distribution. What he finds is that ⟨l⟩\langle l \rangle ⟨l⟩ is always greater than or equal to the input linl_\text{in} lin​. The shift is strictly upward. Frame dragging plus finite-frequency wave-optics effects pump power from the input multipole into higher members of the tower, never lower.

The size of this shift is set by the dimensionless combination aωa\omega aω, where aa a is the spin parameter and ω\omega ω is the frequency of the wave. When aω∼O(1)a\omega \sim O(1) aω∼O(1), the centroid can shift by 5 or more units of ll l. When you are far from that regime, the shift is suppressed below 0.5.

There is also a saturation. For input topological charge lin≥7l_\text{in} \geq 7 lin​≥7, the centroid shift caps out at around 1.5 to 2, almost regardless of where you are in the spin-frequency plane. The reason is the centrifugal barrier. The angular momentum potential goes like l(l+1)/r2l(l+1)/r^2 l(l+1)/r2, and at high ll l this gets steep enough that mixing into modes far above linl_\text{in} lin​ is suppressed by tunneling factors that do not really care about Kerr parameters. The light gets bumped up by one or two units, and that is about it.

Question three: what does the dominant mode do?

If you watch the dominant multipole lpeakl_\text{peak} lpeak​ (the single multipole carrying the most power in the outgoing field) as you sweep across the spin-frequency plane, it does not vary smoothly. It moves in a staircase. For lin=1l_\text{in} = 1 lin​=1, the dominant mode jumps from l=1l=1 l=1 to l=2l=2 l=2 to l=3l=3 l=3 and so on up to about l=8l=8 l=8, in sharp bands as you crank up the spin and frequency.

The bands have to be sharp because lpeakl_\text{peak} lpeak​ is by definition an integer. But the underlying physics here is that Kerr scattering pumps power through the multipole tower in unit-of-ll l increments. The spin and frequency together determine how many steps the dominant power has climbed.

This is the kind of structure you do not get from a smooth geometric-optics calculation. It is a wave-optics signature, full stop, and it lives in a regime where the eikonal description fails.

Question four: is the calculation actually right?

The total mode-mixing norm (the unnormalized power in the outgoing field, summed over modes) shows a sharp ridge in parameter space where the amplitude rises by one to two orders of magnitude.

The ridge tracks a specific curve: ω≈mΩH\omega \approx m \Omega_H ω≈mΩH​, where ΩH\Omega_H ΩH​ is the angular velocity of the black hole horizon and m=linm = l_\text{in} m=lin​ is the azimuthal quantum number. This is the superradiant threshold, the boundary across which a corotating mode gets amplified at the expense of horizon angular momentum.

The fact that the ridge sits exactly there, and migrates correctly as linl_\text{in} lin​ changes, is a non-trivial cross-check that the calculation is wired up correctly. Spin-1 superradiance is a known phenomenon (the maximum amplification factor is about 4.4% for electromagnetic perturbations near extremality), and this pipeline reproduces its location in parameter space without it being put in by hand.

So what does this all mean?

Here is where I want to be careful, because this paper is doing something important but limited, and the limits matter.

What it gives us is a quantitative reference dataset. If you want to know what the full-wave OAM scattering matrix of a Kerr black hole looks like in the parameter range relevant to photon rings, you can now go look it up. Geometric-optics calculations can be checked against it. Future observations can be compared to it. Lab analog experiments (acoustic superradiance from rotating absorbers, for instance, like the Cromb et al. 2020 result) can be benchmarked against scaled versions of these predictions.

What it does not give us is a direct path to observing Kerr OAM signatures with the EHT. At the relevant frequencies (230 GHz, 345 GHz) and for a black hole as massive as M87*, the dimensionless frequency Mω is around 10¹⁶, which is far above the parameter range the paper explores meaning EHT operates in the deep geometric-optics regime (Mω ≫ 1), not the long-wavelength wave-optics regime where these mode-mixing effects are pronounced. Direct detection would need either coherent integration across very broad frequency ranges or new OAM-resolved interferometric techniques that do not yet exist.

It also does not, by itself, tell us anything about the black hole information paradox or about whether OAM channels carry quantum information through Hawking radiation. The classical OAM channel exists, and it is well-behaved, and that is a necessary condition for any soft-hair information-channel proposal to work. But necessary is not sufficient. The quantum question stays open.

Twisted light bouncing off a spinning black hole comes out twisted in the same way it went in, but with its energy reshuffled along a discrete staircase whose steps you can predict. That is a clean, solid result. The follow-up questions (geometric-optics comparisons, gravitational waves, quantum information) are now sitting on top of an actual computational foundation rather than a pile of order-of-magnitude estimates.

Reference: T. Nestor, "Orbital angular momentum mode-mixing for Laguerre-Gaussian beams scattered by Kerr black holes," April 2026.

I Reported Microsoft for Wrongful Dismissals. Then Someone Wrote a Hit Piece About Me Claiming I was in DOGE.

Last year, I was employed at Microsoft as a senior engineer. What happened to me there, and what I've since learned is happening to hundreds of others, should alarm everyone working in tech.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-192472108

Microsoft has been systematically gaslighting, scapegoating, and wrongfully terminating employees while publicly claiming its layoffs are about "flattening management." Public data tells a different story: only 17% of impacted roles in Redmond were classified as managerial. The rest? Engineers and workers quietly pushed out through manufactured performance failures, denied ADA accommodations, firing of employees on family medical leave, and a culture of concealment designed to give executives plausible deniability.

I know this because it happened to me. I've also spent months collecting stories from other recently fired or laid off from Microsoft which is the primary reason for posting my story - people experiencing the same pattern of isolation, gaslighting, and retaliation and a collective recognition of the issue is now required. That reporting triggered an investigation, which is currently pending.

Shortly after, a hit piece appeared about me on Substack. It went viral.

What the hit piece actually says

The piece ties me to DOGE, Elon Musk, and an alleged insider threat to national security, based on one fact: I had registered an LLC with "Department of Government Efficiency" in the name.

Here is the full explanation, in one paragraph:

The LLC was created to organize residents (particularly in my hometown of Simi Valley, California) against illegal housing moratoriums that were blocking affordable housing development. The name, borrowing DOGE's branding, was deliberate political satire aimed at the conservative local government responsible for those moratoriums. I never intended to formally register it as a business, and when I discovered it had been filed, I was the one who proactively reported it to Microsoft HR and had it dissolved. The hit piece frames this as something that had to be uncovered. I reported it myself. I have never had any contact with DOGE and while I was sponsored for a TS/SCI w/FSP I never actually used it on any program. I have spent years publicly criticizing Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. I advocate for Medicare for All and affordable housing. Of course, the ultimate irony is that I was wrongfully accused of DOGE membership while simultaneously reporting on the mass layoffs and wrongful firings at major tech companies.

I was also accused of “harassing Boulder PD” to distract from SA victims, having affiliations to Dr. Peterson, and even spreading rumors of “Jewish space lasers.” Here's the reality: CU Boulder has systemically been covering up rape in fraternities and I complained to CU Boulder PD about a wrongful campus exclusion order after reporting declines of mental health of students, cocaine sales near campus, and inconsistent covid restrictions - shortly before a mass shooting and riot in the city where students were found flipping police cars. When it comes to Dr. Peterson during a time of unemployment I did interview him but was critical of his ideological framing - rather than insisting on a purely cultural or psychological origin of despondency I pushed Peterson that a part of the reason that the gender roles are no longer feasible is socioeconomic precarity. The comment about “Jewish space lasers” was sarcastic.

The piece then padded this with seven-year-old social media posts, out-of-context tweets, and ideological profiling to paint a picture of someone it could attach to a villain narrative. It worked. It got 200 restacks. My response did not.

Why this matters beyond me:

This is not just about a hit piece. This is a playbook.

When someone triggers accountability for a powerful institution, the response is rarely a direct rebuttal. Instead, the person is discredited through character attacks, placed in a political box, their history stripped of context, their motivations reframed as sinister. Political polarization is a clever tool of dividing the public to avoid institutional accountability: no matter what complaint is presented - half of the population can be easily mobilized against a target. The goal is not to refute the claims. The goal is to make the messenger radioactive.

It worked on me temporarily. But the investigations are still open.

What I documented at Microsoft is real: wrongful terminations, denied disability accommodations, coordinated H-1B lobbying while conducting mass layoffs of American workers as well as visa holders, and a deliberate culture of concealment enforced through AI surveillance and performance manipulation. I have corroborating accounts from multiple former employees.

The broader picture:

Microsoft submitted $2.35 million in federal lobbying disclosures in April 2025, directed at the Department of Labor and DHS, focused on H-1B visa expansion, immediately before announcing 9,000 layoffs. From 2021 to 2024, Microsoft submitted H-1B requests at a rate of 5.17 for every one net new job created in the U.S.

This is not a labor shortage. This is wage suppression - and that is nothing negative to say about the H1B visa holders themselves.

Meanwhile, AI tools that Microsoft sold publicly as productivity breakthroughs were, internally, producing garbled outputs on security processes they hadn't been trained on; employees were being performance-managed for failures caused by missing documentation, nonfunctional tooling, and withheld information. When I raised this, I was told to "self-unblock", which would have required violating security policy.

When in a culture of concealment and gaslighting employees cannot meaningfully bring up legitimate security bottlenecks or holes or the source of delays - that's when problems arise. In one instance I was blamed for delays on responding to email while in spite of refreshing my inbox I found I did not recieve emails for hours after they were sent to me (issues that have since even been corroborated by crew members of the Artemis II mission):

https://youtube.com/shorts/64maKfqD0Nw?si=8H2LDOCXoZ2AL2pM

Amid new pushes for "zero trust" security, I couldn't help but to consider the irony. Microsoft's motto has been "Microsoft runs on trust" - but what happens when Microsoft doesn't trust their own engineers at their Redmond campus, but somehow trusts third party contracting companies abroad? The consequence of this is that due to friction, their own engineers aren't able to do their own tasking.

I was then placed on a PIP with timelines that a colleague with five or more years at Microsoft confirmed were not reasonable. I was given the option between a 45 day PIP or to take severance - then only 4 days into the 45 day period, I was wrongfully fired without severance. The stated reason for my firing was delays on a feature item, delays caused by the exact environment I've described: missing documentation, nonfunctional tooling, withheld information, and denied ADA accommodations. The firing had nothing to do with the LLC. Microsoft HR already knew about the LLC because I told them.

For the entire duration of my PIP I did not have any functional hardware that could even at minimum turn on to access repositories due to the elimination of Microsoft's on site IT department where employees are plagued with months of delays for issues like yubikey shortages and SAW failures. This is an issue that many Microsoft users are painfully aware of - the issues with Microsoft support. AI is sold as a panacea to rationalize gutting critical support staff but when there are inevitable failures as a direct result of this individuals are scapegoated.

Microsoft's own internal research shows that employees are more likely to use AI tools due to fear of judgment from other coworkers - while established peer reviewed research in the field of psychology shows psychological safety in teams promotes team success. When AI tools replace workplace coordination, unintended bottlenecks arise especially with evolving security measures that are not captured by AI models. This is particularly problematic when deployed as a replacement for teachers in classrooms or a replacement for doctors and nurses in medical settings:

What I'm asking:

I'm not asking you to take my side. I'm asking you to consider the pattern: a worker reports institutional wrongdoing, a state and/or federal investigation opens, and within months a viral hit piece appears tying that worker to the most politically toxic figures of the moment, with no meaningful evidence.

One of the Microsoft leadership principles is that you must first identify issues before you can take action.

What I’m saying here is that the largest, most wealthy corporation on the planet in history by market cap should have been able to do the bare minimum of provide their engineer functional laptops that could at minimum turn on and access repositories in a reasonable amount of time rather than resort to scapegoating and gaslighting of their engineers when bottlenecks are identified, and provide proper accommodations requested directly from a doctor.

That pattern should concern you regardless of your politics. This is no longer a matter of just “moving on” continuing to allow these violations of worker protections will only continue to embolden this misconduct from tech giants.

The investigations are ongoing, and I spoke just today with WSHRC on the case assignment. The irony is that now, instead of getting a DOGE audit they will be getting an audit from the state of Washington instead - with hundreds of thousands looking on. I will continue to publish what I find.

Trevor Nestor is an independent researcher and former Microsoft senior engineer. His full account of the Microsoft situation is at [The Problem with Microsoft]. The state and federal investigations referenced in this piece are active as of the date of publication.