Towards Redaction of Digital Information from Electronic Devices

In the discovery portion of court proceedings, it is necessary to produce information to opposing counsel. Traditionally, this information is in paper form with all privileged information removed. Increasingly, the information requested during discovery exists in digital form and savvy counsel is requesting direct access to the original digital source: a broad spectrum of additional digital information can be often be extracted using digital forensics. This paper describes the major problems which must be solved to redact digital information from electronic devices. The primary hurdle facing digital redaction is the lack of a rational process for systematically handling encoded, encrypted, or otherwise complex data objects. Any such process would need to incorporate a method for validating the integrity of electronic or digital redaction processes. Keywords: digital forensics, redaction, electronic discovery, legal production, privileg