The Committee for the Evaluation of International Participation in the USA Telecommunications Providers Sector, aka Workforce Telecom or the Committee, immediately beneficial that the Federal Communications Fee (FCC) deny an software by ARCOS-1 USA Inc. and A.SurNet Inc. subsea cable system (ARCOS-1 Cable System) to switch the system by including an extra section immediately related to the USA by way of a brand new touchdown station in Cojimar, Cuba.
“The USA helps an open, interoperable, safe, and dependable web world wide, together with in Cuba. Sadly, the Cuban authorities doesn’t share that view,” Assistant Lawyer Common Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Division’s Nationwide Safety Division. “So long as the Authorities of Cuba poses a counterintelligence risk to the USA, and companions with others who do the identical, the dangers to our crucial infrastructure are just too nice.”
As submitted to the FCC, the ARCOS-1 Cable System software would have allowed for the one direct, industrial subsea cable connection between the USA and Cuba. This raised nationwide safety issues, because the cable-landing system in Cuba can be owned and managed by Cuba’s state-owned telecommunications monopoly, Empresa de Telecommunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETECSA). The Authorities of Cuba – which the USA acknowledges as authoritarian and a overseas adversary of the USA – may entry delicate U.S. information traversing the brand new cable section by way of its management of ETECSA.
The Committee’s suggestion was based mostly on components together with the next:
- The Authorities of Cuba has lengthy represented a big counterintelligence risk to the USA by advantage of its espionage and different intelligence actions focusing on the USA. Immediately connecting an undersea cable from the USA to Cuba, the place a Cuban state-owned firm would have unique use of the cable, management over that cable’s Cuban touchdown station, and distant entry to site visitors on it, may advance the Cuban authorities’s intelligence targets by giving it direct entry to the U.S. individuals’ communications and delicate information traversing the cable.
- This danger of entry shouldn’t be restricted to U.S. site visitors destined for Cuba. There are a number of methods by which site visitors destined for locations exterior Cuba, which in any other case wouldn’t traverse Cuban networks, may nonetheless be misrouted by ETECSA or in any other case re-routed over this cable into Cuban territory and the Cuban authorities’s palms.
- These dangers are exacerbated by the Cuban authorities’s relationships with different overseas adversaries, together with the Folks’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. The Cuban authorities may share any info collected from this cable with these overseas adversaries – thereby advancing extra counterintelligence efforts by overseas adversaries towards the USA.
Subsea fiber optic cable techniques are a crucial nationwide safety asset and carry a lot of the world’s web, voice and information site visitors between continents. Though the USA helps the Cuban folks’s entry to an open, interoperable, safe, and dependable web, the Committee discovered that this explicit license software pertains to a cable touchdown that presents unacceptable dangers to U.S. nationwide safety and regulation enforcement pursuits that can’t be mitigated.
The Committee was established pursuant to Government Order 13913 and is led by the Division of Justice’s Nationwide Safety Division, International Funding Evaluate Part. The Division of Homeland Safety and the Division of Protection are fellow members of the Committee. The Division of Commerce’s Nationwide Telecommunications and Info Administration filed the advice on behalf of the Government Department.
Extra info in regards to the Committee’s suggestion is obtainable on the FCC’s Worldwide Bureau Submitting System (IBFS), beneath Docket Quantity SCL-MOD-20210928-00039