Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire Law Says Redaction Software Counts as Good Faith. It Never Says the Software Has to Work.

Two free tools from this newsroom, and the three tests that tell you whether a black box on a public record is real or decorative.

Draw a black rectangle over a name in a PDF and the name is still in the file. The rectangle is a shape sitting on top of a text layer that nobody removed. Select the area, copy it, paste it into any text editor, and the name you thought you hid comes back whole. This is not a rare defect or an exotic attack. It is what happens by default when somebody covers text instead of destroying it.

Full disclosure: Granite State Report built both tools described here, publishes them, and benefits when people use them. Judge them by the tests below, not by this newsroom’s description of them.

New Hampshire law has an opinion about this, and the opinion runs the wrong way. Under RSA 91-A:4, IV(f), a public body that releases exempt information by mistake is shielded from civil damages if it acted in good faith to redact, unless it acted wantonly or recklessly. The statute then defines one route to good faith by name: automated software producing redactions, used alongside spot checks. The law does not ask whether that software destroys anything. It asks whether the body used software and looked at some of the output.

Those are different questions, and only one of them protects the person whose address was in the file. Read the asymmetry plainly: the shield runs to the public body, and the consequence of a redaction that did not hold runs to whoever was named in the document. A resident who filed a complaint, a witness, a person who called for help. They do not get a good-faith defense. They get a phone number on the internet.

None of which makes IV(f) indefensible. A body that redacts thousands of pages a year and faces ruinous liability for one miss will stop releasing anything, and a records law that produces nothing is worse than one that occasionally produces too much. The provision is a reasonable answer to a real problem. It just rests on an assumption nobody is checking, and the checking is cheap.

So this newsroom built the tool it wanted to exist, and published the test that decides whether any redaction held. Both are free. Both run entirely inside your own browser. Neither uploads your file anywhere, including here.

Redact, and the three tests

The redaction tool takes a different route than a drawing program. It converts every page of a document into pixels, burns the black boxes into the image, and assembles a new PDF out of those images. There is no text layer left to recover, because the text layer does not survive the conversion. The document’s metadata does not survive it either.

The cost is real and worth stating plainly: the file you get back is not searchable. Nothing in it can be indexed, quoted by machine, or found with a search box. That is the price of the words being gone rather than covered.

Here is what that produced on a real document. Feeding the tool the fifteen-page text of RSA 91-A itself, page one of the original yielded 3,342 characters of extractable text. The finished file yielded zero characters, across all fifteen pages. Searching the output for terms that appear all over the original returns nothing, because there is nothing left to return.

Do not take that on faith, from this newsroom or anybody else. Open any redacted file you are about to send and run three tests. Drag your cursor across a blacked-out area and see whether text highlights. Select the whole document, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. Search the file for a word you redacted. A file that passes gives you nothing on all three.

Those tests work on any redacted document, not only one made here. They work on a record a town just released to you. If a public body tells you its redactions were made in good faith under IV(f), the three tests are how you find out what that good faith produced.

The second gap: a right with no form

The other tool answers a plainer problem. New Hampshire gives every citizen the same right to inspect a governmental record. What it does not give anybody is a template. A request that names no statute, sets no deadline, and asks for a subject instead of a document is the request that sits in a drawer until everyone forgets it.

The 91-A Request Builder writes the other kind. Fill in who you are, which body holds the record, and what you want, and it produces a letter that cites the paragraphs that govern, asks for an itemized estimate before any charge, and states what the five-business-day rule requires the body to do. You can paste it into an email or print it and mail it.

The tool also computes the date that deadline falls on, which turns out to require a decision the statute declined to make. RSA 91-A:4, IV(b) says five business days and never says what a business day is. The definitions section of the chapter, RSA 91-A:1-a, defines six terms: advisory committee, governmental proceedings, governmental records, information, public agency, and public body. Business day is not among them. Neither is day.

So the tool states its own assumption on the page rather than hiding it. It skips weekends and the legal holidays listed in RSA 288:1, computed from that section’s rules instead of a hardcoded calendar. Worth knowing what is on that list and what is not: RSA 288:1 does not name Juneteenth, it calls the February holiday Washington’s Birthday, and it counts biennial election day in even-numbered years. A legal holiday is also not the same thing as a particular town hall being closed, and plenty of New Hampshire offices work straight through Columbus Day.

If a body misses the date and blames a holiday, ask it which one, then check the answer against RSA 288:1.

What neither tool does

Both have limits, and a tool that hides its limits is worse than no tool. Neither of these decides what may lawfully be withheld. That question belongs to RSA 91-A:5 and to statutes outside this chapter, and the redaction tool will black out exactly what you tell it to and nothing else, including the wrong thing. Neither one is legal advice. This is a newsroom, not a law firm, and a letter is not a lawyer.

The request builder will not tell you whether a record is exempt, and it cannot tell you what to do when a body refuses. Its deadline is arithmetic performed on a stated assumption about what a business day is, not a ruling that any court or ombudsman has blessed. Neither tool contacts a public body for you, and neither one keeps a copy of anything, which also means neither can recover work you lose by closing the tab.

And if a redaction you receive turns out to be decorative, do not publish the document to prove it. Tell the body which page failed and give it the chance to reissue. Then send this newsroom the dates.

What these cost

Nothing. The request builder is open to anyone who lands on the page. The redaction tool sits behind a free subscription, meaning an email address and one click, because a newsroom run by one person in Northfield has no other way to know anybody is out there.

There is no paid tier, on either tool or anywhere else on this site. Nothing here sits behind a paywall, and a tool that helps somebody exercise a statutory right is the last thing that ever should. This newsroom spends its time arguing that access to public records should not carry a price. Charging for the letter that asks for them would be a strange way to make that case.

Both sit in the site header under Tools, and in the footer beside The Noncompliance List, the standing record of which New Hampshire public bodies meet their duties under this statute and which do not. The placement is the argument. One tool helps you ask. The list records what happened when people did.

So send the correspondence. If you file a request built here and a body answers, refuses, or hands you an invoice, this newsroom wants the dates and the paper. Documents make entries on that list. Accounts alone do not.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every statutory claim above was read against the text at the New Hampshire General Court and is listed in the fact check with its source. The measurements of the redaction tool are Granite State Report’s own, on its own software, which is why the three tests are printed here for readers to run themselves. Granite State Report is a newsroom, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Corrections run at the top of the piece and stay there; write to granitestatereport@gmail.com.