What is redaction? Meaning, origin and examples

What does redact mean? Definition and senses of the word

Redact is a transitive verb: you redact a report, a letter, a passage, a name. The noun is redaction, and the adjective redacted describes the document or passage that has been treated. Three senses coexist in current use, from the oldest to the most common.

• The editorial sense: to put a text into its final written form, to edit or revise it. Biblical scholars still call the editor who combined several sources into one text a "redactor".
• The censorship sense: an authority blacks out or cuts the lines of a newspaper, a book or a letter before it circulates. Wartime censors treated soldiers' mail this way during both world wars.
• The administrative and professional sense: information that must not leave the organization (names, numbers, health data, trade secrets) is removed from a document so that the rest can be shared.

This third sense is by far the most common today, and the law often provides for it. The US Freedom of Information Act lets agencies withhold exempt passages while releasing the rest of a record. In the European Union, Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 on public access to documents states that when only parts of a document fall under an exception, the remaining parts are released. French law has the same rule for administrative documents (article L311-7 of the Code on relations between the public and the administration): what cannot be disclosed is blacked out or detached, and the rest is communicated.

Several neighboring words circulate. To strike out means to draw a line through text; to sanitize is common in government and IT for removing sensitive content; to anonymize aims to prevent anyone from identifying a person. French speakers should beware of a false friend: the French "rédaction" means writing, while the English "redaction" means hiding. The site's glossary clarifies these nuances and defines each term.

Where does the word redact come from? Origin and history

Redact comes from the Latin redactus, past participle of redigere, "to bring back" or "to reduce to a certain state". It entered English in the fifteenth century with the sense of putting something into writing, then of arranging and editing a text. The meaning shifted gradually: editing a text for publication often means cutting what should not appear, and in the second half of the twentieth century, with the declassification of government records and freedom of information laws, "redact" became the usual word for blacking out sensitive passages.

Other languages took a more visual route. In French, the verb is "caviarder", from the expression "passer au caviar". The most widespread explanation points to the censorship of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas I, in the nineteenth century: censors covered forbidden passages of newspapers and imported books with black ink, and the dense black blots on the page looked like grains of caviar. French also uses "biffer", to strike out, which gave Biffer its name.

Two remarks help to use the term correctly:

• redaction applies to part of a text, never to the whole document: a document withdrawn from circulation is withheld or suppressed, not redacted;
• the expected result is that the passage becomes permanently unreadable, which distinguishes redaction from highlighting or from a strikethrough line that leaves the text legible.

This last point has taken on new importance with digital documents. On paper, black ink really destroyed the information. In a file, a black box may be nothing more than a shape placed over text that is still there. The word is the same, but the technique must follow: digital redaction has to remove the text from the file, not just hide it on screen.

Examples of redaction, from the newspaper to the digital file

• The censored press: during wars, entire newspaper columns appeared blacked out or left blank after military censors had been through them.
• Public reports: in 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report was released in the United States with many blacked-out passages, each accompanied by a code giving the reason for the withholding.
• Freedom of information releases: a public body discloses a procurement contract after redacting unit prices and the passages covered by trade secrecy.
• Business documents: an HR department sends an employment contract to its lawyer with the employee's social security number redacted.

Digital redaction has its famous failures too: black rectangles placed over text that a simple copy and paste brought back. We tell those stories in the article how to remove text from a PDF so it is really gone. The lesson never changes: reliable redaction removes the information from the file, metadata included.

That is the principle behind Biffer, the software we publish. On your computer, offline, it finds names, contact details, numbers and the fields specific to 18 professions, then rewrites the text: each value is replaced by an alias or a mask and disappears from the file. On a scan or an image, the pixels are blacked out permanently. The specific case of PDF files is covered on the page redact a PDF, and the full list of functions on the page features.