Redaction

Bayanat includes a built-in redaction tool for permanently removing sensitive information from documents and images, directly in the browser. Use it to black out names, faces, addresses, signatures, or any detail that must be protected before a file is shared, exported, or published.

Redaction is available to Admin and Data Analyst roles, from any PDF or image attached to a Bulletin.

True Redaction, Not a Cover-Up

The distinction matters for human rights work, where a leaked identity can put someone at risk. Bayanat does not simply draw a black box on top of the content:

• PDFs — the text and graphics beneath each box are permanently deleted from the file, and document metadata is scrubbed. There is no hidden layer to copy, search, or peel back.
• Images — the selected regions are painted out and the image is re-encoded, so the original pixels are gone from the redacted file.

What you see is what remains. Nothing sensitive survives underneath.

The Original Is Never Touched

Redaction always produces a separate redacted copy. Your original, unredacted file stays intact and attached to the Bulletin as the authoritative master. This means you can:

• Keep the complete evidence internally while sharing only a safe version
• Produce different redactions of the same source for different audiences
• Re-redact later if more information needs protecting, always working from the clean original

Immutable by design

The original media can never be overwritten by the redaction tool. Edits only ever apply to a redacted copy.

How to Redact a File

1. Open a PDF or image from a Bulletin's media
2. Choose the redact option to open the redaction editor
3. Draw boxes over the regions to remove. For multi-page PDFs, move through the pages and mark regions on each.
4. Save as a redacted copy

The new copy is created alongside the original, tagged with the Redaction media category and grouped with its source in the media view so the relationship is always clear.

Revising a Redacted Copy

If you need to adjust a redaction, you can reopen a redacted copy and either save the result as another new copy or overwrite that copy in place. Overwriting is only ever permitted on a redacted copy; the original remains protected.

Supported Files

• Documents: PDF
• Images: JPG, JPEG, PNG

Good Practice

• Redact from the original each time rather than redacting a redaction, so you always start from a known-clean source.
• Review the saved copy before sharing it, especially multi-page documents, to confirm every sensitive region was covered.
• Share or export only the redacted copy. Keep the original within Bayanat under its normal access controls.