Configuring a SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence Redaction Control

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In the last post, we learned that the SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence Redaction control enables users to redact text so that the data is visually obscured. This allows users to choose which information to hide in an object, like sensitive data – personal information of a witness and victim – prior to dissemination. In this post we’ll look at how the administrator configured the Redaction control on the information report to redact the sensitive data before disseminating the information to the news outlet.

First, we add the Redaction control. In this case, we add the control to the information_report page.

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Now let’s set up the configuration. Here is a quick reminder of how our redaction control was displayed to the user:

We use the properties pane to make our selections.

We give the control a title. This title appears for the users at the top of the redaction control.

Then we select an API plug-in. APIs are a set of rules and protocols that enable different software components to communicate with each other. This plug-in identifies objects for automatic redaction by using a mix of regular expressions and SAS Visual Text Analytics concepts. You can use the plug-in that is included with SAS Investigation Content Pack or write one of your own. In this example the administrator selected Extra Concepts which is included with the SAS Investigation Content Pack.

The code can be modified by going the Code Editor and then selecting the Redaction Plug-in - Extra Concepts Solution Extension.

(To learn more about APIs, read this post What are APIs? By Anna Bickford .)

 

Next, we select the Data source, which for this example the administrator used Fields.

Then we enter the height we want the display to appear on the screen.

We select the Automatic redaction suggestions checkbox to allows users to choose to apply the redaction automatically, otherwise the redaction is all manually entered.

The Show label column is selected to display a Label column in the control identifying what each concept’s redaction label is.

Remember I mentioned that the plug-in identifies objects by using a mix of regular expressions and SAS Visual Text Analytics concepts. Examples used in the configuration are Person, Location, Organization, Phone Number, and Email Address.

For Text group configuration, we enter a label. This label is displayed to users in the Redaction Label column after automatic redaction is complete. The length of the label determines the length of the black box that is shown to the user for this piece of redacted text.

We selected Standard redaction length so that each piece of redacted text is replaced with a black box that is six characters long, otherwise the black box would reflect the length of the original text. For concepts where a redaction label was assigned, a black box covering the data also displays the designated label.

As you can see, SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence Redaction control enables users to redact text choosing which information to hide in an object, like sensitive data – personal information of a witness and victim – prior to dissemination.

Related post - Redacting Information for Dissemination

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