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Redaction: What You Need to Know

By Sue Hughes
July 02, 2014

While the term redaction is well known in the legal community and government agencies, the term itself is new to those not in the fields mentioned above. Because of improper redaction making its way into the headlines, more and more people are seeing the term. In the past, you would print the file and then manually redact it with a thick black marker. Lay people may have been redacting without even knowing what it meant to redact a file.

Redacting a file, whether that file is in paper or electronic form, is intended to permanently obfuscate private, sensitive, privileged, classified or other types of content. The reasons for redacting a file may be e-discovery, or the need to make a file public. Even prisons oftentimes redact inmate correspondence (although there has been much argument as to the constitutionality of that practice).

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