At the recent 79th annual United National General Assembly the USA, Australia, Canada, the European Union, the Federated States of Micronesia, Finland, France, Japan, the Marshall Islands, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Tonga, Tuvalu, and the UK endorsed ‘The New York Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables in a Globally Digitalized World’.
The Joint Statement lays out principles to ensure undersea cable infrastructure is secure, reliable, sustainable, and resilient. It also highlights the major risks that the current reliance on undersea cables presents.
The endorsers ‘aspire to the following principles’ (verbatim):
- Design undersea cable infrastructure and services with resilience, redundancy, and security in mind. Build and maintain this infrastructure incorporating cybersecurity best practices that safely facilitate international communication.
- Advance cooperation between endorsers to promote the selection of secure and verifiable subsea cable providers for new cable projects, in particular for intercontinental ICT cable projects, reduce latency and enhance route diversity, protect cables and anticipate risks of intentional or unintentional damage as well as risks of communications and data being compromised.
- Seek closer government and industry coordination for supporting responsible undersea cable deployment, maintenance, and repair according to established international industry norms.
- Emphasize the importance of spatial and route planning to promote coordinated use of seabeds, protect cables from natural or man-made hazards, ease chokepoints, and reduce risk of inadvertent disruption while expanding global connectivity.
- Encourage where applicable alternative submarine cable routes with a view to improving resilience of the global cables network.
- Share with interested third parties and governments best practices for permitting and regulation to support international cable systems and supporting services and capabilities.
- Encourage undersea cable network service providers and operations and maintenance providers to have transparent ownership, partnerships, and corporate governance structures.
- Consider security risk assessments regularly across the cable lifecycle, taking into account technical and non-technical risk factors such as undue influence by a third country on suppliers and service providers, while developing and implementing risk mitigation measures.
- Promote data risk mitigation frameworks and data security measures to protect cable networks from unauthorized access to data in transit or storage for dual purposes.
- Comply with applicable international law, as reflected in UNCLOS, and domestic law and consider relevant policies at regional or national level, as well as applicable industry best practices, notably with regard to risk assessment and management.
