Redaction has been common in the legal profession for many years but the Freedom of Information Act and more open content sharing as a result of a web-connected world is driving the practice.

Before the MPs’ expenses scandal earlier this year, few people would have known the meaning of redaction. And then, only if you’d read media coverage in detail, would you know it’s using a white or black bar to hide sensitive information in a published document, for example an MP’s home address. Hiding text with a white or black bar serves two purposes – first to hide the sensitive text and second to indicate that text has been redacted.

Before electronic documents, a thick black marker or white-out liquid were used to redact paper documents prior to photocopying. For example, in most jurisdictions the identity of minors is protected under law. So a judgment in a case concerning a minor, which is a matter of public record, might be redacted to hide information that could help identify the child.

One of the drivers for redaction has been the legal right of citizens in countries that have Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) to request information from public institutions. In the USA, the FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson back in 1966. The Act allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States Government. In 2000, the UK also passed a Freedom of Information Act that empowers citizens to request information from public bodies, who are required under law to respond. Germany has a similar law – the 2005 Federal Freedom of Information Act (Gesetz zur Regelung des Zugangs zu Informationen des Bundes), and many other EU countries have similar legislation in place.

The role of redaction in Freedom of Information is significant. Redaction makes possible the publication of information while protecting more sensitive data, the disclosure of which may compromise national security or place an individual in danger. I suspect that most redactions are made for more mundane reasons, but typically those disclosing information have to abide by a code of practice that is intended to prevent over-zealous use of the black marker.
PDF (Portable Document Format) files are a frequent target of redaction. They are often thought of as the electronic equivalent of paper, and the final form of a document that may have been authored electronically, scanned from an original, possibly assembled from a variety of sources. Governments and commercial organisations worldwide rely on PDF files for publishing documents on the web, putting them in the public domain or for delivering document-based information to third parties.

PDFs are preferred, particularly in the legal profession, because metadata (for example, evidence of past edits of the document) is stripped away during the process of conversion from the authoring format (such as a word processor) to PDF. Moreover they can be secured against casual changes while still permitting viewing and printing.

However, it’s vital that the tool used to redact a PDF not only obscures the text or graphics identified for redaction, but also removes the underlying data as well. There have been examples where redaction has failed, leaving the sensitive information in a form that can be recovered. In one case, a judgment issued by a US court was redacted in the word processor by the simple application of a black text background. As a printed document, it was redacted; the text was entirely obscured. But as an electronic document, all one had to do was swipe the text areas and copy to the clipboard, from where it could be pasted into a word processor.

With the demand for ever greater transparency from our public bodies, and the legal obligations of companies and other organisations, the requirement for redaction can only increase. Redaction, when used properly, is an important safeguard in today’s information-driven world that protects the innocent or vulnerable.

I live in a small three bedroom Victorian semi-detached with my wife and three children (all under five years old). We love our home but over time the inevitable clutter collected has begun to seriously shrink our living space.

We’ve thought about moving to a larger home but that’s not practical with the current housing market. Another possibility was to transfer the clutter up into the loft but that’s just moving it around and would make it difficult to access. I decided that the best solution was to move some of my offline clutter into the digital world. After all, expanding space digitally is just a question of buying a bigger harddrive.

I started building a Media Center PC and moved our CD collection of photographs onto it. The PC helped me clear a number of my living room separates (e.g. CD player, DVD player and Video recorder) into one single device.

My office was the next target. I’d stored a lot of paperwork (bills, bank/credit card statements and letters etc.) in a large brown filing cabinet. My filing system was the paperwork building up on my desk and then eventually (on a damp weekend) we’d file it away in the big brown box.

I already had our gDoc Fusion product installed on my home computer (like a model employee!) and this allows me to easily assemble and modify electronic documents that I create. I looked around for scanning applications but decided to use the “Windows Fax and Scan” software that came with Windows 7 to scan the pages. This application was previously only supplied with certain high end versions of Windows Vista, but it now comes as standard with Windows 7 software. Together these applications gave me the ideal tools to do my digital filing.

My scanner is a simple home Multifunction Printer (MFP) and doesn’t have a sheet feeder, so I was prepared for the scanning part of the task to take some time. I started by taking a suspension file of credit card statements and scanning them in. I knew that it would be easy to correct any pages I had put on the scanner upside down and so I didn’t worry about the page orientation. Also, as I scanned I found there were a few stray pages from other sources (i.e. not credit card statements), again I didn’t worry about this as I could drag the stray pages to another file later. Removing the need to check what I was scanning meant that this stage was surprisingly quick and required little concentration.

Next I put the scanned pages into gDoc Fusion. I could have done this by simply dragging all of the scanned TIFF files into the “Document View” but this would create a large number of single page PDF documents. I decided to have a single document containing all of the scanned pages and therefore chose to use gDoc PDF Creator. I selected all the single page TIFF images and right-clicked, selecting “Print”. I printed from gDoc PDF Creator generating a single PDF. I dragged this file to the “Document View”.

Once all of the scanned pages were in gDoc Fusion “Document View” the rest was easy. I created some blank documents and dragged the stray pages into them leaving just the credit card statements in my main document. I selected all of the pages that I had scanned upside down and rotated them back to the right way round. I flicked through the pages in “Flick View” and made sure they were in date order. I set some security settings and saved the document to a folder on the Media Center PC. Finally, I had the satisfaction of shredding the original documents. 

In future, I’ll probably let new paperwork stack up for a month and then scan it. Adding new pages to the existing credit card documents is as easy as dragging and dropping pages. Having the statements filed away on the Media Center PC means that they are easy to find and flick through, which is useful when you need to discuss something with call centre representatives, for example. Finally, the statements are secure and backed up which reduces the likelihood of identity theft.

I still have more suspension files to move online but the plan is to have the filing cabinet gone by Christmas so we’ll then have an ideal place to put the family tree this year!

The strike by UK Royal Mail workers over the last few weeks has ended but during the action I was intrigued by how many magazines arrived with notes telling me how to get hold of an electronic copy if my next printed one was delayed in the post.

I hadn’t expected quite so many of the publishers to have the facility to provide a good enough electronic delivery service as a fall-back. I’m now wondering how much this expedient response to a short-term need might affect long-term magazine deliveries?

There are already plenty of titles that can be read online; will this increase the trend in that direction?

There are a different set of technical issues around electronic deliver, including rights management and on-screen readability, for instance. It’s possible the publishers who have jumped into making digital files available in a rush because of the strikes may be put off from rolling out a larger scale, permanent solution by the teething problems they’ve likely encountered.

I’d be interested to hear views on the impact of this kind of short-term event on the long-term future of magazine distribution.

Personally, I read a lot online already, but if I subscribe to a printed magazine it’s because I want high-quality images, or because I stare at a screen for too much of the day already and want to be able to kick back and relax with it. I cling to the belief that it makes me discriminating, rather than just a Luddite!