Belgian defence ministry accidentally publishes plans for new headquarters

The Belgian defence ministry’s plans for a new national security centre were unintentionally accessible by anyone through the online planning permission platform Openpermits, journalists at La Dernière Heure discovered.

Plans for the €500 million project were online for almost 48 hours, showcasing blueprints for a state-of-the-art headquarters on an 11.4-hectare site opposite Nato, designed to accommodate 4,000 staff, including the Belgian defence Staff, the ADIV military intelligence service and the Cyber Command unit.

The plans became temporarily public due to the planning permission procedure, which requires documents to be available for public consultation.

Although the published plans were deliberately "cleaned up" and did not detail specific office layouts, they did contain sensitive information about access and circulation plans.

“We thought these documents would only be available for consultation upon request and could not be downloaded,” the defence project manager told La Dernière Heure.

When La Dernière Heure discovered the error, the newspaper alerted Brussels state secretary for town planning Ans Persoons, who immediately had the plans removed from the website and stressed the importance of diligence on sensitive projects.

“It’s crucial that documents that are strategic in nature are not available to just anyone,” Persoons said. “This incident shows that more control is needed in such situations.”

The regional urban planning authority, urban.brussels, points out that the responsibility for uploading the documents lay with the defence ministry itself. The system automatically puts the plans online as soon as they are approved by the applicant.

Although no critical information was released, the ministry called the situation "worrying". In future public inquiries, documents will be made available again, but with even more censorship applied for security purposes.

“For the licence application for the new headquarters, simplified plans were drawn up,” a defence spokesperson told Bruzz.

“These were stripped of sensitive information, such as destination and layout of spaces. They contained only the necessary information for the advisory bodies, such as the fire brigade.

"In consultation with the competent services, the content of the files on Openpermits is limited to what is strictly necessary to allow the public investigation to continue."

The project, which is considered to be an important part of the modernisation of the defence ministry, continues unabated.

An investigation into possible downloads of the plans is ongoing.