Two floor plans showing all the ballrooms at the Delta Lodge, a scenic resort near Kananaskis, Alta., were publicly available over the Internet this week.
The first, an on-line brochure advertising the site of this summer's G8 summit of world leaders, remains on the hotel's Web site.
The other was part of a package of 32 maps and diagrams on a Web site used by the government to post calls for tenders on federal contracts. It has raised the hackles of security experts around the world and was removed from the Web on Wednesday night.
None of the maps poses a security threat, according to the government and the RCMP, because they merely show the building's internal structure.
"That's total nonsense," said Harvey Kushner, a counterterrorism expert at Long Island University in New York. Experts such as Mr. Kushner said Canadian officials should know that crucial details distinguish innocuous public information from top-secret intelligence.
The map from the brochure shows the approximate location of the building's walls and washrooms, and allows anyone looking at them, including would-be terrorists, to guess in which rooms certain meetings would be held.
The map from the package of drawings indicated how the Canadian government plans to customize the hotel for the meetings. It showed doors where the brochure's map has solid walls. It showed one big room where the brochure's map has four.
More important, it described the function of each major room in the building, from art storage to bilateral negotiations, and indicates where the delegates will sit.
Experts were also alarmed to discover that it took less than five minutes for The Globe and Mail to obtain the documents.
Each month, about 160,000 people visit http://www.merx.com, a Web site used by the government to post calls for tenders on federal contracts. The public can look for contracts by typing in a topic -- for example, "G8" -- and the search engine will rifle through a listing of business opportunities posted by federal, provincial and municipal governments.
Searching is hit-and-miss: Yesterday, the term "G8" returned 65 unrelated hits, while the term "G-8" matched only one contract. It related to the summit.
Clicking on one of the contract titles, such as "Rental of Conference Systems for the G-8, Heads of State Summit," brought up a short summary of the contract.
A few more clicks allowed users to order the full-bid documents after scrolling past a legal waiver, completing an on-line contact-information form and entering a valid credit-card number.
The site charged $36.77 for 132 pages of documents in portable document format (PDF) about the G8 summit, though the prices varied depending on whether the pages are to be e-mailed, downloaded, couriered, mailed, faxed or picked up.
Bid documents normally are available on-line until a tender expires, but anyone who tried to order details about the G8 yesterday received an error message saying the system "failed to load opportunity."
Although the ease of access to G8 documents has raised security concerns, the speed and efficiency of Merx allows it to process $12-billion in government contracts annually.
The site, owned by a subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal, said last week that it had won an extension of its relationship with the federal government until May 31, 2004.
Advertising itself as "the first Internet-enabled public sector tendering service of its kind in the world," the company estimates that some governments have saved 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of purchasing by using the system.
A historical problem with government tendering was that only large, well-connected companies often would bid on contracts. Posting contract information on the Internet has solved the problem in some circumstances because the bidding is relatively cheap and easily accessible.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.