Canada counterterrorism center plans found in garbage

The Canadian government has some explaining to do over a security breach regarding their new counterterrorism center. Blueprints for the facility wound up in the garbage, some of which were rescued by an Ottawa citizen on a stroll. Six files have yet to be found:

Canada will probe how blueprints for the new headquarters of an elite military counter-terrorism unit ended up in a pile of garbage, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Thursday.

The Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit, housed inside an armed forces base in Trenton, Ontario, is designed to cope with the aftermath of an attack using weapons of mass destruction. …

The plans — which the passer-by handed to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper — contain detailed drawings of the building’s floor plan, electrical grid and the storage bay for robots designed to detect chemical and biological agents.

One has to imagine that the housecleaning will begin shortly in Canada, and a few rear ends might join the blueprints on the trashheap by tomorrow. Canada, like the US and every other nation, has specific handling procedures for classified material. Either someone forgot to mark the blueprints properly or someone mishandled them despite their classification — and building plans for secure facilities have at least the same level of classification as the work projected to occur inside of them.

We’ve had our share of these incidents in the US as well. Having worked inside secure facilities in my (distant) past, I’m pretty sure I know how Canadian authorities will react. Anyone who had any sort of connection to these prints will get interrogated thoroughly, and probably everyone involved will either get fired or have their access levels downgraded significantly, at least for a while. And if Canada can’t account for the rest of the blueprints, they may have to consider redesigning their center to make the missing plans obsolete.

Blowback