Redacting Email Content
What is Message Redaction?
We’ve all had to do it at some point: present data to a requester. Whether they are opposing counsel involved in litigation, the news media looking into a story, a concerned parent inquiring about their student or some other member of the public wanting to know more about how some public entity works, the inevitability of such a request is always there.
When those requests come in, email archives, Microsoft Teams chats and Text/SMS messages are all part of the eDiscovery basket and anything pertinent will need to be provided. However, that same archived content can contain sensitive data that cannot be provided without potentially compromising someone else’s rights. This complex web of transparency laws and privacy rights lead us to the concept of ‘Redaction’.
Content redaction is a crucial process in handling Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Public Records Requests (PRR), Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests, as well as in providing requested documents to opposing counsel. With content redaction, organizations can protect sensitive information across a high volume of content, while still meeting disclosure requirements.
In simple terms, message redaction “blacks out” words/phrases in the content so that they are not able to be read, generally to enforce privacy rights of the party being investigated or anyone unrelated who may be caught up in the search. While this normally can’t be used towards data that is responsive to the original investigation’s request, it certainly can cover data that isn’t, such as Personally Identifiable Information (common examples like a Social Security Number or Date of Birth which are rarely germane to any given case), information on a minor or even medical record information.
Common types of information that may require redaction include:
Personal Identifiable Information (PII), such as social security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers.
Confidential business information, including financial statements.
Trade secrets, especially intellectual property and engineering designs.
Biometric data.
For these situations, DataCove supports content redaction in the email’s Email Address fields, Subject Line and Message Body fields, which are most commonly used when preparing emails for printout or export to .PDF files.
Generally, these redaction use cases are specifically employed by smaller organizations, such as K-12 school districts and small municipalities and counties, whose requesters may not be technically savvy to work with fully digital copies of the data that would otherwise get presented to opposing counsel. Printed emails and .PDF files are all that may be needed or allowed, and in these scenarios, DataCove’s redaction function shines. Instead of printing out the emails and then taking the big black marker to them, that work can be done in DataCove and automated to a degree, followed by final printing with the redactions completed cleanly.
It should be noted that DataCove’s redactions are reversible and are never, ever modifying the original email content. Only the displayed version of the email for printing and .PDF exportation processes gets redacted for presentation purposes. .EML exports and .PST exports will still output non-redacted content as always.
Setting Up for Message Redaction
Message Redaction is a somewhat hidden feature in DataCove, in that it’s not immediately present when searching or looking at emails in the standard view. Given that significant eDiscovery work always involves redaction, the Message Redaction feature has been shifted over into the in-depth eDiscovery area of DataCove, which is maintained with Tags and Legal Holds.
Message redactions are performed through using the Tags feature within Datacove. Through Tags, organizations can group many emails together that share common traits, such as matching against certain search terms that were used for a particular investigation. A Tag can reference a particular project, department, lawsuit, etc and possesses a customizable section for adding a description of what the Tag is for and which search terms are being used to match against emails contained within.
If all emails that require redactions are already grouped together within a Tag, skip ahead to the Redacting Content section.
To view tags, create a new tag, and assign emails to tags, please continue with the below steps.
To create Tags, as well as later find them for reuse, log into the DataCove web interface and click Email Viewing from the top header bar, then select All Tags on the left hand side menu.
A list of all previously created Tags and, if present, Legal Holds will appear on this page, sorted alphabetically by name.
A listing of details about the Tag will follow:
Which user account created the Tag.
The date of creation of the Tag.
Whether the Tag is also a Legal Hold or not (Legal Holds are specialty versions of Tags that will hold emails indefinitely, regardless of the system’s Retention Policy).
The ability to both see the quantity of emails that have this Tag associated with them, as well as sort emails by the Tag.
The ability to edit the description of the Tag (does not apply to Legal Holds once created).
The ability to delete the Tag.
To create a new Tag, scroll to the bottom of the page and find the Add Tag button.
Give the Tag a short, descriptive name that allows identification at a glance, then click Add Tag.
Next, add a description for the newly created tag that describes its purpose, which search terms might be getting used on it and any end dates that may be pertinent to knowing when it is due for presentation or export. This can be helpful for future reference or cross-departmental reference.
NOTE: Want to store the tagged emails indefinitely? If the Legal Hold checkbox is selected, all emails under the selected tag will be retained and not deleted by DataCove’s Data Retention policy, if configured.
Click the blue Create Tag button to finish creating the tag.
The Tag will now be live and ready for application.
Once a Tag has been created, emails must be assigned to the Tag. Then, users can redact the desired content within an email Tag.
To begin Tagging emails, run a search for the emails that are relevant to the case. Guidance on how to search within DataCove can be found here.
Once emails that match the desired search content have been found, click the checkbox to the left of each email to select it.
Note: Selecting the checkbox adjacent to the Export button, above the Search Results themselves, will select all emails that returned from a search.
Once the emails have been selected, click Tag in the top action bar.
Select which Tags to associate with the selected emails.
Then, click the blue OK button.
This will assign the selected tags to the selected email and prepare them for Redaction to begin.
Now, it’s time to redact content from the emails.
Click All Tags from the left hand navigation bar.
From the list of tags, find the Tag containing the recently selected emails that redactions need to be performed on.
Click the blue magnifying glass icon within the tag’s row to spawn a list of those emails in the Email Viewing Pane below.
From the list of emails that appear, click on an email that possesses content that needs redaction. Next, determine which term or phrase requires redaction from within the email Subject Line or Message Body.
Highlight the term or phrase that requires redaction.
Next, click the Redact icon from the toolbar.
Select whether to redact the selected term/phrase from only the current document, or from all emails under the tag.
Current Document redaction will redact the term on the currently viewed email’s Email Address fields, Subject Line or Message Body. If there are multiple instances of the term within the same area, such as the same Message Body of the message being viewed, it will be redacted across all instances that are found.
Entire Tag redaction will locate the same highlighted term from all emails within the Tagged Email set and redact it across all of them.
Note: Misspellings or any variations of the content being redacted, whether in the Current Document or Entire Tag, will not be redacted since they are not a direct match for the original content.
The Reference Field allows for the substitution of any desired wording that can be used as infill for the redacted data. Nominally, any redacted content will be filled with a series of “x” characters, but adding in a Reference word or phrase, such as “redacted,” “HIPAA-sensitive data” or “COPPA-protected information” will allow the reader to understand that the content was redacted and not actually a series of X’s, along with a defined reason why it was redacted. In these scenarios, the content will instead appear as “xxx redacted xxx.”
Redacted content without a Reference Field being populated will appear as a series of “x” characters within a pair of brackets, like [xxx xxxxxx].
Click OK to commit the redaction.
In this example, the email address of “IT@linux.com” from the From field and the Message Body was redacted, with the Reference Field populated with “Private email address.”
The redaction process executed against the From Field in the email, as well as the Message Body, and hid that content behind the redaction coverage, leaving only “x” characters and the Reference text behind as to what was present there originally.
With the email’s desired content now redacted, proceed on to any other emails that require redaction and once complete, move ahead to the next step of Exporting Redacted Emails.
Once all redactions have been performed, users can export these emails to a .PDF file in order to share with others.
Use the the left hand side of the Email Viewing pane’s checkboxes to select which emails require export, or by using the checkbox above the entire email list, select all of the emails for export.
Click the Export icon in the top header.
A pop-up dialog box will appear. Type in a descriptive name for the .zip file that will be created that will make this particular export comprehensible at a glance.
Next, select PDF for the Output file type.
Selection boxes exist to also export Attachments or SMTP Headers that are blended into the PDF file, but they are not recommended since the content inside of them would not be redacted.
Note: The message redaction process is only compatible with PDF file exports. Other export types will show all content, without redactions.
As PDF exports can take some time, especially if a sizable quantity of emails are being converted to PDF, it is good practice to have the DataCove notify the user exporting the content via email when they are complete.
The “Email on Completion” field allows the specification of an email address to dispatch a notification to that the export is complete and now ready for download.
Once populated, press the blue OK button to begin the export.
While the export is running and after it completes, its progress can be found by selecting Email Viewing in the top header bar, then clicking My Exported Results on the left hand side menu.
This page will show the progress of the export as it proceeds, and once complete, will allow for the download of the file containing the PDF files themselves.
More information on PDF downloads can be found here.
The PDF files contained within will possess the same redacted content as was marked for withholding from the web interface and are ready for release to the requester.
Removing Redactions
If an accidental redaction was made or there otherwise needs to be a removal of a redaction, DataCove can remove the redaction and restore the content back to its original form.
In order to remove a redaction from an email, navigate to the email in the same Tags section as before, then click the Unredact icon from the toolbar.
A pop-up dialog box will appear, showing the full list of redactions that have been created under this Tag.
Select from the following:
Remove all redactions: Remove all redactions that have been performed across the Tag (helpful if multiple terms/phrases have been redacted). Choosing this selects all Redactions under this Tag all at once.
Specific redaction removal: Select the checkbox next to the specific redaction(s) to remove.
Next, choose which emails the redaction removal will apply to:
Remove from current email: Remove selected redactions from this email only.
Remove from entire tag: Remove selected redactions from all emails associated with the Tag.
Click the blue OK button to confirm redaction removal.
Once OK is pressed, the redactions will be reversed and the original content will appear once more.