Case Study: Accelerating Evidence Redaction

“Trustpoint.One not only beat our law firm’s vendor’s cost by 30 percent, but also turned the redaction project around in just two days,” said the federal facility’s corporate counsel. “This is exactly what you want from your preferred vendor”

How Trustpoint.One helped a large federal facility met their critical adjudication hearing deadline

The rising use of surveillance technology at US federal facilities has been placed at the center of many court proceedings, with video gathered by these operations serving as critical evidence at adjudication hearings. However, to prepare such evidence for submission to the court, these facilities must redact personally identifiable information (PII), such as video images of individuals uninvolved in the case.

PII redaction can be challenging, with manual reviewing and editing processes incurring major expenditures of time, money and manpower. Moreover, these federal facilities are frequently under extremely tight time constraints, as they strive to meet demanding court deadlines to deliver redacted evidence. For facilities dealing with rising populations, swelling caseloads and mounting quantities of video evidence, traditional approaches to video redaction are simply too slow and expensive to meet today’s demands.

To meet this challenge, Trustpoint.One has partnered with Veritone. Leveraging Veritone’s AI- enabled Redact software, Trustpoint is offering video evidence redaction services that dramatically slash the cost, effort and time required to edit PII. The powerful solution is already being leveraged by a large federal detention center, allowing the facility to meet its obligations to quickly and economically deliver video evidence while still protecting PII. This development has major ramifications for the other 100-plus federal centers located across the nation, providing a path toward system-wide compliance with video evidence laws.

The Challenge
Legal authorities at the federal facility were required to submit to a court three video evidence files, each three to six minutes in length. The facility was given just one week to provide the videos. Because these videos were captured at the facility using surveillance and body-worn cameras, the footage included images of hundreds of individuals not involved in the case, such as detainees and federal officers. This required extensive video editing to redact PII appearing in each frame of the video.

Lacking the internal resources and technological capabilities required to complete this task, the facility’s legal team became concerned that they wouldn’t be able to meet the court’s deadline. The team contacted its third-party legal counsel to see if the firm could redact the video quickly. However, the firm quoted a price of $72,000 and said it would take more than a week for its vendor to manually review and edit the videos—far too expensive and slow to meet the team’s deadline and budget constraints.

Instead, the facility’s legal team turned to Trustpoint.One. The Trustpoint eDiscovery team, met the criteria to complete the task while meeting the project’s tight timeline and limited budget and the facility chose the solution rather than working with its outside counsel.

The Solution
Having won the confidence of the federal facility’s legal team, Trustpoint was able to complete the redaction process at a blistering pace. Using Veritone Redact, Trustpoint was able to completely redact hundreds of shots of detainees and federal officials from the videos in less than three hours.

Trustpoint initiated the redaction project by exporting the three evidence videos from Relativity, the e-Discovery platform used by the federal center. The company then ingested the three evidence videos into Veritone’s cloud-based Redact Application. Through the assistance of AI, the application automatically identified individuals’ heads within the video evidence, drawing a highlighted box around each head along with a timestamp denoting each time that head was identified in the clip.

After identifying hundreds of heads in each of the evidence videos, Trustpoint confirmed each automated selection and determined which should be redacted— all with just a few mouse clicks. During this review process, Trustpoint further automated its workflow by capitalizing on a Veritone Redact capability that tracks user-defined objects such as notebooks, computer screens and more throughout the video evidence, expediting a once-manual process.

Employing its expertise in redaction, Trustpoint conducted a final quality-assurance review to ensure any additional heads and objects were identified and edited from the videos as required. A process that took less than three hours to complete.

Veritone’s AI-driven Redact application can also automatically provide an audio transcript of a media file, allowing reviewers to easily find and redact PII audio by using a keyword search tool.

When the process was completed, Trustpoint was able to upload the first-round draft of the three redacted videos back into the federal center’s Relativity platform. The three videos required the redaction of a total of 956 heads. Despite the large number of redactions, Trustpoint was able to deliver the completed videos just over one business day after the detention center’s initial request, at a dramatically lower cost than would be charged by the facility’s legal partner’s vendor.

The legal team was extremely impressed with the turnaround time and the thoroughness of redacted PII evidence video. Not only did Trustpoint.One save the facility thousands of dollars in third-party legal consulting costs, they were also able to turn the redacted videos around in less than two business days.

The federal center’s legal team cited several factors driving their selection of Trustpoint.One to serve their redaction needs, including:

• One’s status as a trusted partner that’s able to think outside of the box in order to meet client needs.
• Veritone Redact’s automatic head-detection feature and ability to track user-defined objects moving forward in an evidence video.
• Ability to comprehensively report all actions taken by a user when redacting video or audio evidence, supporting compliance with chain-of-custody requirements.