Justice selects software to edit FOIA responses

• By Vandana Sinha
• Nov 14, 2002

Pitching their black permanent markers, U.S. attorney's offices and seven other Justice Department units have begun using redaction software to delete sensitive material from documents in Adobe Portable Document Format.

The department paid $150,800 for an enterprise software license for Redax from Appligent Inc. of Lansdowne, Pa. The Justice offices handle millions of Freedom of Information Act requests and court filings each year.

After training in December, the legal teams will use their mice to drag deletion boxes around sensitive portions of PDF files or choose from lists of words to erase data automatically.
The software renders an electronic copy with blank spaces ready for e-mailing. The deleted material cannot be restored to the text.

'It also maintains the old copy,' said Mary Aileen O'Donovan, Justice's program manager for software licensing.