Highly Enriched Polonium (white paper regarding static {as in electrical charge} analysis
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June 13, 2026
A Distributed-Provenance Instrument for Documenting and Analyzing Public Positions on Known, Legally-Sanctioned Activity
**A White Paper**
*Draft for discussion. Subject to revision.*
Abstract
Many categories of activity in public life are legally sanctioned and broadly known to exist, yet are not, as a matter of convention, disclosed or foregrounded by the public figures who participate in or position themselves around them. Examples include certain procurement relationships, advisory affiliations, intelligence- and security-adjacent authorities, and policy commitments that are exercised in practice but rarely campaigned on. The result is an accountability gap that is not secrecy in the legal sense — nothing is hidden that is required to be revealed — but is opacity in the practical sense: a public cannot easily understand where its officials and prominent public actors *stand* on activity it has a legitimate interest in.
This paper specifies an instrument that closes the practical gap without manufacturing a surveillance one. The system documents **publicly attested positions** taken by public figures on a defined category of known, sanctioned activity, structures those attestations into a queryable corpus with cryptographically verifiable provenance, and provides an analytical layer for understanding how a network of public actors positions itself over time. The design commits a tamper-evident, takedown-resistant record of *what was said and where*, not an inferential profile of *what a person has not disclosed*. The distinction is load-bearing and is enforced in the architecture, not merely asserted in the framing.
## 1. Purpose and Scope
### 1.1 What the system is for
The instrument exists to answer a specific, civically legitimate question: **for a defined set of public figures, on a defined category of known and legally-sanctioned activity, what positions have they publicly attested to, and how does the resulting network of positions look and change over time?**
This is ordinary accountability work — the kind performed by oversight researchers and political journalists who map, for instance, which legislators quietly support a surveillance authority they never mention on the campaign trail. The contribution here is infrastructural: a verifiable, durable, analyzable corpus that survives pressure, resists quiet alteration, and ties every claim to a primary source.
### 1.2 The unit of analysis
The atomic object of the system is an **attestation**: a single instance of a public figure expressing a position on the activity-category, bound to its source. The unit is *a position attested to a source*, not *a fact extracted about a person*. This choice is the foundation of everything that follows. A system whose records are attested public statements is auditable and contestable; a system whose records are inferences about undisclosed conduct is a dossier. The two have similar surface descriptions and opposite consequences.
### 1.3 Subjects in scope
- **Public officials acting in an official or candidate capacity.** Documented on positions relevant to their public role. This is the core and least contestable category.<br>- **Public figures who have voluntarily made themselves public on the specific issue.** Documented *only on their public statements on that issue* — never on their affiliations, associates, or network ties.
### 1.4 Subjects and operations explicitly out of scope
- Private individuals.<br>- Affiliation- or association-mapping of non-officials, including from public data. (See §6 for why this is excluded even though it is technically feasible.)<br>- Any subject for the purpose of cataloging who they are connected to rather than what they have publicly said.
## 2. The "Peripheral" Question, Stated Precisely
A motivating observation behind this work is that a public figure's *real* position on a sensitive-but-sanctioned activity often surfaces incidentally — in an aside, a reply, a procedural vote, a stray remark — rather than in their headline messaging. The system is explicitly designed to capture this incidental material. But "incidental" must be defined carefully, because two readings diverge sharply:
**Reading A — incidentally-expressed positions (in scope).** A public figure expresses a stance on the known activity-category in a low-salience context: an offhand remark, a committee aside, a vote with no accompanying statement. The *subject* is still a position the figure has publicly taken; it is simply not foregrounded. Capturing this — and flagging it as low-salience so it is not dressed up as a manifesto — produces a *more* honest corpus than one limited to polished statements.
**Reading B — accumulation of...