Law enforcement video redaction with Reduct
September 2023
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3 min read
Any information related to a client is solely their property.
Lawyers and attorneys who fail to blur out the information in confidential documents and recordings of their clients run afoul of the American Bar Association’s rule on safeguarding client property.
Blurring confidential information~ also known as legal redaction, falls under the American Bar Association's rule of editing, hiding, or removing specific content to protect a client's confidential information.
If not done correctly, you can face several legal consequences. 😳
The main idea of blurring out information
Anonymizing face or personally identifiable information (PII) prevents the disclosure of private information, trade secrets, classified data, or other privileged details that should not be made public.
It's primary objective is to strike a balance between transparency and protecting sensitive information.
Why are some of the law enforcement failing at this?
Attorneys and paralegals are often required to blur parts of videos, audio, and production documents related to their clients. Mistakes while blurring information are easy to make but impossible to undo.
In an interview, one of the security technologists and a special adviser to IBM security, Bruce Schneier, pointed out that redaction mistakes occur because people lack the required knowledge to use the tools.
Avoid Redaction failures with Reduct
Traditionally, redaction was solely done by dedicated video editors.
Their job was to put a rectangular bounding box or pixelate areas in video recordings, either manually or by using complicated software.
Now, with tools like Reduct, you can blur faces and PII (personally identifiable information) without additional help or prior experience in video editing.
Reduct is a text-based video editing tool that offers a feature called Redaction by Reduct.
This feature allows police officers and officials to quickly blur out sensitive information from the videos by masking the words, sentences, or parts of the recording (either audio or video).
Read more on video redaction best practices
Mask personally identifiable information with these three easy steps:
Prerequisites
Experience in Video Editing- 0 years
Device- Any computer with a browser
Here’s How It Works:
Step 1- Upload Your Recording to Reduct:
Upload your recordings to Reduct directly from your computer or through web links. You can copy and paste the URL in the import from the web link field.
You can either make use of Reduct’s one-click importing feature for Zoom, Teams, or Meet recordings or connect to a live meeting and directly have the video imported to Reduct.
Reduct supports various video formats, including mp4, mp3, mov, wav, aac, avi, vob to mpg.
Step 2- Select the Transcript You Want to Hide:
With Reduct you have the option to choose between human transcription and computer transcription.
For the meantime, you can make use of machine transcription and work on the transcript that rolls out within seconds of uploading the recording.
Identify the section/dialogue you want to anonymize in the video and highlight it in the transcript.
Each word in the transcript syncs with the spoken words in your video. Selecting a section (sentence or paragraph) of the transcript will help you choose the video portion associated with it for blurring.
Step 3- Use the Redaction feature to mask video or parts of it:
You can hide personally identifiable information (PII) depending on where you select the transcript.
After selecting a certain dialogue, you can then click on the ‘redaction’ button to apply the blur effect.
An opaque black box will appear and you are free to position it anywhere on the video screen.
With this feature, a black box mask is applied to a specific part of the video, making it easy to select and hide only the required area of the video.
Once done, you can export the entire video file or just the redacted video parts by clicking on the download option.
💡Pro Tip:
With Reduct, you can export your transcript with formatting options like ASCII text or PDF. This helps you meet the specifications of most federal and state court systems.
Reduct offers line numbers and timestamps as needed and helps you ensure your exported transcripts are compatible with your industry-standard eDiscovery and case management software.
Reduct - More than a redaction tool
Reduct is a collaborative video repository where you and your team can review, search, highlight, and edit video as easily as text. It is a one-stop app for all your legal video/audio requirements.
🔐Accurate and secure human transcription
Reduct provides 99% accurate human transcription overnight for all kinds of recordings~ either challenging or easy.
Transcribers in Reduct sign an NDA contract to ensure the accurate and secure handling of your transcription. With Reduct all your confidential data remains protected.
Other added benefits-
🔍Make your recordings searchable~ find what matters, fast
🎥Edit deposition videos, as easily as editing text
🛍️Store your recordings in Reduct’s video repository
⌚Extract video summaries with exact timestamps
By leveraging Reduct’s redaction feature, you can save time and effort while maintaining utmost confidentiality. Try Reduct today and see it for yourself.
