Redaction
The process of permanently removing or obscuring exempt or sensitive information from a record before it is released, while disclosing the remaining content.
Redaction is the editing of a record to remove or obscure information that must be protected — such as material covered by a FOIA exemption, classified information, or personal data — while releasing the rest. Properly done, redaction lets an organization disclose as much as the law allows and protect only what it must.
Redaction must be permanent and complete: simply hiding text behind a black box in a digital file is not enough if the underlying text can still be extracted. Good redaction removes the protected content entirely from the released copy. In FOIA and public-records work, reviewers redact line by line and note the exemption relied on for each withholding. At scale — across thousands of pages — redaction is one of the most demanding parts of disclosure and declassification work.