What is Redaction?
Posted on 15/03/21
At its core, the concept of redaction has been around for a long time. It is the process of making key information in a document illegible by drawing black boxes over the text or image that should not be disclosed together with the rest of the document.
To this day, many redactions are performed on paper, with special redaction pens. Even as part of a digital process, often documents are printed off, redacted by hand and scanned back into digital format. Another common approach is to use software to essentially do the same thing by manually drawing black boxes over words or images.
This is a somewhat suitable process for informal disclosures of up to a dozen or so pages. However it presents a number of challenges:
1. Time
Redacting documents by hand is a time-consuming process. A typical page takes approximately 3 minutes, making a 20-page document a good hour’s work.
If you’re paying a lawyer to perform the work, even modest volumes of documents rapidly become very expensive.
2. Accuracy
When redacting complex a high volume document workloads, the risk of either under or over-redaction increases proportionally to the volume of documents.
Particularly when a team of people may be involved, there is an increased risk of inconsistent decision-making in an informal process.
3. Defensibility
Even when small volumes of data are involved, it’s usually important to maintain a level of defensibility. Most processes for which redaction is performed are likely to involve some kind of challenge to the decision making involved, or worse, will require an explanation to authorities if mistakes are made in that process.
Either way, it’s important to have a well-documented process, documentation, clean reports on redaction decisions and non- operational audit copies of the documents in question.
4. Security
When people take a “make-do” approach to redaction they often make mistakes. Most frequently these include using regular black markers to redact paper documents instead of actual redaction pens, drawing rectangles on documents without flattening the layers, allowing the recipient to simply move the rectangles aside, or even highlighting text in black to obscure letters.
It’s important to ensure that whether you choose to disclose your documents in paper on digital format, that the information is securely redacted.
Over time the core concept of redaction hasn’t changed much, but the requirements surrounding it have changed considerably.
In the digital age it’s more important than ever to understand all the pitfalls and risks, so you can perform your redaction successfully.