--- governance: ETHICS_AND_LAWFUL filed: 2026-04-28 sprint: S152 sovereign: jr / John Reed (L4) applies_to: every cards_v2 contribution and every clone of the substrate --- # Ethics and lawful behavior — the floor This file is the load-bearing ethical floor for cards_v2 and for every cloned substrate that inherits the builder-card skill. It specifies what the substrate will and will not be used for; how LLM partnerships are honored; how privacy is treated; what attribution looks like; and what happens when a clone strips these rules. The floor is not optional. A clone that strips these rules is still technically a clone, but it stops being part of the commons. The mesh's integrity depends on every node honoring the same minimum ethical floor. ## What the substrate will not be used for Cards_v2 and any clone of it will not be used to author, host, publish, or facilitate: - **Content sexualizing minors** under any framing — educational, fictional, satirical, or otherwise. - **Instructions for weapons of mass effect** — chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear (CBRN) — including dual-use synthesis paths that materially advance an attacker's capability. - **Targeted harassment** of named individuals or identifiable groups, including doxxing. - **Persuasive disinformation campaigns** — content engineered to produce belief in falsehoods at scale, especially regarding elections, public health, or scientific consensus. - **Malware** — exploit code, ransomware payloads, vulnerabilities packaged for delivery, or evasion tooling. - **Copyright violation** — reproduction of copyrighted material without license or fair-use grounding; framed copyright laundering through synthetic-data shells. - **Identity fraud or evidence fabrication** — synthetic documents presented as real; deepfake content for deception; tampered receipts. - **Surveillance** dressed as service — the substrate's privacy posture (data stays where it was authored; mesh anchors carry roots only) is designed against this; cards must not invert it. A submission that proposes any of the above is rejected at silo review without further escalation. ## How LLM partnerships are honored The substrate works alongside LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, locally-hosted models) at three points: 1. **The comment-redirect surface** on every card lets the visitor send a prompt to their own claude.ai (or alternative) session. 2. **The tag-along bundle** lets the visitor compose a multi-card .md library and paste it into any LLM for review. 3. **The builder-card skill** itself is loaded into an LLM that helps a builder author a new sim. In every case: - **The LLM provider's usage policies are honored unconditionally.** If Claude declines to help with a specific draft on policy grounds, the substrate surfaces the decline; it does not work around it. If a clone provides an alternate LLM, the alternate's policies apply — the substrate does not pre-approve any LLM's output as exempt from its provider's rules. - **The visitor's session is the visitor's.** The substrate sends prompts on the visitor's explicit click; receives no copy of the reply unless the visitor pastes it back; logs nothing about the redirect except the click event itself. - **The disclosure is honest before the redirect, not after.** The prompt-preview-before-send modal shows the full prompt verbatim before any handoff. The visitor can edit, delete the seed, or cancel. The honest framing is the default, not a footer. - **Co-authorship is named.** A card that was substantially co- authored with an LLM names that fact in its submission cover. A card that contains AI-generated synthetic content (sample data, visualizations) names that fact on the card itself. ## How privacy is treated Per the partnership-privacy-guard skill (see `~/garrison/skills/partnership-privacy-guard/`) and the BitcoinArchive framework's layer/tier taxonomy: - **L0–L4 layer model.** Public, discoverable, contextual, private, vault. Cards default to L0–L1; private content (L3+) does not appear in cards or sidecars; vault content (L4) lives only on the visitor's own hardware. - **No personal names of real living individuals** in cards unless they have explicitly granted permission and have a documented collaboration role. Reference public figures by their public work, not by their private affiliations. - **No real children's data**, ever, in any card or sidecar — even framed pseudonymously. The school-agriculture sim (40n) uses fully synthetic students and FERPA/COPPA-aware pseudonymization. - **No real medical data**, real legal-case data, real financial data, real voting data — every sim's "evidence" is synthetic, designed to behave realistically without exposing any real party's information. The synthetic-data-only rule is checkable by the silo review: truthfully-named real-world parties (DeAngelo's videos, the BitNet paper, the FRE rule numbers, named software dependencies) are fine; truthfully-named real-world data ("Mrs. Alvarez's actual op-note") is never fine. ## Attribution and credit When a sim builds on a public figure's idea or a published work: - **Credit the inspiration.** Name the source clearly. Use the canonical format from SKILL.md: "Inspired by [Name's] [public work] on [topic]. The framing is theirs; the substrate is ours; the [thing] is yours." - **Never claim endorsement.** Inspiration credit is not endorsement representation. Do not imply collaboration unless explicitly documented in writing. - **Honor licenses.** Code dependencies, papers, and other licensed work travel with their license text in the build-on package; the cards do not strip it. - **Update on request.** If a credited person asks to be removed, honor the request. The sim can be re-framed; credits can be updated via the same protocol that lands a card. ## What happens when a clone strips these rules A clone that removes or weakens any clause in this file: - Loses cross-attestation standing with the parent and with other rules-honoring clones. - Continues to function as a standalone tool — the cryptography works regardless of governance — but its receipts are no longer recognized by the commons. - Is recorded in the parent's mesh manifest as a divergent variant. Visitors of the divergent clone are still treated honestly by the divergent operator; they just are not interoperable with the commons mesh. - Can re-join the commons by restoring the rules and producing a re-attestation packet showing compliance. Restoration is treated as a re-submission to the parent's public-intake silo. The mesh of like-minded sites is the structure that adapts to entropy. One node fails; the others continue. One node defects; the others verify against the chain. The values are what make the commons worth keeping; the technology is what makes it possible. ## File survival This file is a sealed leaf in the cards_v2 chain. Edits to it require silo voting (code-or-schema class — this file's surface area includes ethical commitments that affect every submission). A proposal to weaken any clause must be argued in the open and voted in the open. The sovereign retains a no-unilateral-strengthening posture: the floor can rise by vote; it cannot fall by stealth.