Redaction you can defend, before release
A records request ends with someone deciding what has to come out before the file goes public. That decision is reviewable, the released document is permanent, and the failure mode is famous: a black rectangle drawn over text that is still sitting underneath it, waiting to be copied out.
FOIA and its Exemption 6
The Freedom of Information Act has let the public request federal agency records since 1967, and agencies must disclose them unless the material falls within one of nine exemptions. Exemption 6 covers “information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy” — the reason most releases are redacted rather than withheld outright. That makes the quality of the redaction the whole of the job: a released record is public permanently and cannot be recalled. It also makes the redaction tool part of the release process, which is a poor argument for uploading an unredacted record to a third party in order to redact it.
The everyday jobs
Where we can’t help
- We do not decide what is exempt. The tool removes what a reviewer marks; the judgement about what falls under an exemption is entirely yours.
- These are not a records management system. There is no case file, no review queue and no release log.
- We keep no audit trail of what was redacted, which is deliberate and is also the opposite of what a release process usually wants to record. Keep that trail where you keep the rest of the file.
- OCR runs on our servers and is labelled as such. For a record that has not yet been reviewed, that distinction matters.
Your toolkit
The 12 tools this work actually reaches for, out of 80.
Redact one page and try to select the text underneath. There is nothing there to select.
Redact a recordAlso written for