skills/redaction-reviewer/SKILL.md

---
name: redaction-reviewer
description: >-
  Reviews proposed or completed legal redactions for an identified disclosure,
  filing, publication, investigation, or information-access process. Use when
  testing the legal basis, scope, consistency, document-family treatment,
  redaction labels, reversibility, hidden text or metadata leakage, clean and
  confidential versions, or a redaction challenge and justification schedule.
---

# Redaction Reviewer

Assess each redaction against the actual disclosure purpose and governing legal
basis, then verify that the applied redaction cannot be reversed or bypassed.

## Intake

Obtain the jurisdiction, forum and audience; governing rules, order, protocol or
publication standard; complete unredacted source; proposed redacted version;
production or filing format; redaction log; privilege and confidentiality decisions;
protective measures; document families and duplicates; personal-data and secrecy
constraints; and the authorised approver.

Keep unredacted material in the authorised environment. If only the redacted copy
is available, limit the review to visible and technical defects and state that the
substantive basis cannot be verified.

## Method

1. Identify the precise purpose and audience: party disclosure, public filing,
   court inspection, freedom-of-information release, regulator production,
   investigation report, or publication. Do not transfer a redaction standard
   from one setting to another.
2. Build a basis key from current governing authority and orders. Distinguish
   privilege, personal data, secrecy, confidentiality, irrelevance, trade secrets,
   protected identities, security, and court-ordered treatment.
3. Compare source and redacted versions by stable document and page or field
   locators. Record the content category, asserted basis, decision-maker, extent,
   label, and whether a less extensive protective measure is sufficient.
4. Test necessity and proportionality. Avoid hiding context needed to understand
   disclosed material and avoid redacting a fact merely because it is adverse,
   embarrassing, commercially inconvenient, or already confidential.
5. Reconcile treatment across duplicates, near-duplicates, email threads,
   attachments, versions, translations, exhibits, structured data, and prior
   disclosures. Do not assume an earlier mistake authorises repetition.
6. Check partial redactions, legends, confidentiality markings, page numbering,
   cross-references, indexes, bookmarks, filenames, and the separation of public,
   confidential, sealed, and counsel-only versions.
7. Test technical permanence using authorised inspection: selectable text, OCR,
   layers, annotations, comments, revision history, hidden cells or slides,
   metadata, thumbnails, attachments, embedded objects, alternate renditions,
   search indexes, and copy-paste or extraction.
8. Reconcile the final redaction log and privilege log to the released set. Record
   over-redaction, under-redaction, unexplained inconsistency, leakage, and items
   requiring counsel or court determination.
9. Preserve the clean source, approved redacted version, tool and method, operator,
   date, verification results, approver, release recipient, and challenge history.

## Output

Provide a redaction schedule, basis key, source-to-release reconciliation,
consistency report, technical leakage findings, version and audience matrix,
challenge-response table, blocking defects, and final approval checklist.

## Guardrails

Do not alter or overwrite the only source copy, expose protected content in the
report, infer a legal basis from black boxes alone, or promise that visual covering
is secure deletion. Do not remove adverse evidence, defeat lawful access, or apply
redactions without authorised legal and technical review.