One small step for transparency...

...one giant leap for common sense? 

Possibly.

SLINGSHOT is CSE's "SIGINT production and dissemination system. It is used for gathering client requirements; end-product report (EPR) authoring, storage and searching/retrieval (including Second Party reports). It also allows for monitoring and logging of client access to EPRs."

For two decades, CSE has insisted on redacting SLINGSHOT's name whenever it appears in documents released to the public — as in the example shown above — despite the fact the name has been publicly known for almost all those years. 

It looks like that policy may finally have changed.

SOMOS for that secret

As long ago as 2006, the consulting firm that helped develop the system revealed its name in a web post:

The system was also mentioned in a number of the Five Eyes documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013. For example:

Those revelations were of course unauthorized, but the name was also confirmed in a number of official document releases when the redactors evidently failed to catch it.

Such as:

And: 

Still, the blanket redaction policy went on. 

This example, and it's just one of many, is from an NSIRA report released in 2021:

 

Schrödinger's CATAPULT

That report, incidentally, contained my favourite redaction of all time, a sort of quantum superposition in which the word SLINGSHOT was redacted for anyone who didn't know what it was but was obvious to anyone who did:

It's both there and not there at the same time!

SLINGSHOT comes into the light

Has the madness finally ended? Maybe.

NSIRA's report on CSE internal sharing of information related to Canadians, released on January 25th, contains not one, but two, unredacted instances of SLINGSHOT's name, suggesting that we may be witnessing a deliberate decision by CSE to declassify the name rather than a routine redaction fail.  

 

If this really is a change in policy, I'd like to think my little rant on Elon's Hell Site back in November had something to do with it. Maybe it gave the folks at NSIRA enough ammunition to convince CSE it really did make no sense to continue redacting SLINGSHOT.

If so, it's one small step forward for transparency. 

There is of course a whole lot more about CSE that is well known — or should be well known — that the agency continues to refuse to acknowledge or provide official information about on spurious security grounds. 

Still, every journey starts with a single step.

Update 3 February 2024: 

Yet another instance of SLINGSHOT unredacted turned up just one day after this post was written, in a Federal Court ruling issued on October 10th, 2023, but only made public in declassified form on January 30th.

It seems pretty clear now that this really is a change in policy. Score one for common sense!

Update 2 June 2024:

Three more SLINGSHOTs in NSIRA's Review of the dissemination of intelligence on People’s Republic of China political foreign interference, 2018-2023, which was released on 27 May 2024.