Surveillance
Surveillance is the sensor-to-decision chain: the governed path from a raw observation to a canonical entity a person can act on. Its defining property is the human gate, an observation is never promoted to a fact automatically. The platform gathers, weighs and clusters evidence; a person decides whether it becomes canonical.
The reachable slice: observed to canonical, human-gated
The chain available today is the entity-promotion lifecycle and the evidence machinery around it:
- Observation → candidate → canonical entity promotion, with evidence weighting and a bounded observation buffer.
- A provenance Merkle chain and continuity verification, so the evidence behind a promotion is itself tamper-evident and its chain of custody is checkable.
- Clustering, scoring and contradiction detection, grouping observations, scoring their strength, and flagging evidence that conflicts.
- Signature packages and forensics, the assembled evidence a decision rests on.
- Compliance profiles, and an approval gate over quarantine decisions, the point at which a person, not the system, decides.
The promotion lifecycle
*Figure: the surveillance promotion lifecycle. An observation (neutral) is clustered and scored into a candidate (cyan, in-flight); a candidate becomes a canonical entity (green, verified) only through a human approval gate, and may be held in quarantine (amber) on contradiction or human hold.
Table equivalent
| From | Transition | To | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| (start) | first seen | Observed | A raw observation enters, buffered |
| Observed | cluster · weigh · score evidence | Candidate | Evidence assembled into an in-flight candidate |
| Candidate | human approval gate | Canonical | A person promotes it to a canonical entity: never automatic |
| Candidate | contradiction / human hold | Quarantine | Held apart on conflicting evidence or human decision |
| Quarantine | re-examined | Candidate | Returns for further evidence and a fresh decision |
| Canonical | acted on | (end) | A fact a person can stand behind |
Why the human gate is the product
An observation is a claim, not a fact. Systems that promote observations to facts automatically are exactly the systems that produce confident, unaccountable errors. Surveillance keeps the machine on the side of the work it is good at, gathering, weighing, clustering and flagging contradictions, and keeps a person on the decision that assigns identity. Because the evidence rides a provenance Merkle chain with continuity verification, the person deciding can see the chain of custody behind every candidate, and the decision itself lands on the tamper-evident record.
Across the deployment matrix
The chain runs on a single cell with its own evidence buffer and provenance chain, so it holds sovereign and air-gapped with no coordinator: observations are clustered and scored locally, and the human gate is a local decision. It works single-cell and, where cells can reach each other, multi-cell. The promotion decision and its evidence are governed by the same classification ladder as the rest of the platform.
Related topics
- Sensor Intake, where the observations come from, and where inbound content-provenance verification runs.
- Governance (deny-closed), the gate model that the human approval step fits into.
- Audit and tamper-evidence the record every promotion and quarantine decision lands on.
- The entity model, the principals a canonical entity may be resolved against.