The rules of redaction: identify, protect, review (and repeat)

Abstract

The frequent data leak reports in the press attest to the difficulty of identifying and protecting sensitive content. Redaction is particularly challenging because it seeks to protect documents by selectively removing sensitive portions, rather than by quarantining or encrypting the whole document. We review current redaction practice and technology and describe a prototype system that supports the natural redaction workflow and addresses some limitations of current technology. In particular, our system supports all phases of the redaction process, through the use of linguistic content analysis, an interactive user interface, and inference detection algorithms.