01
Scope and authority
One product, one request, explicit counts, named owners and agreed exclusions.
Method and limitations
A documented evidence method, with judgment kept accountable.
Local tools inventory and retrieve sources. Model-assisted suggestions remain provisional. A human reviews material answers, the customer confirms facts, and the released archive is integrity-checked.
FICTIONAL REVIEW CASE · DEMONSTRATION
Evidence lineage
- 01
Source
Access standard
DEMO-SRC-014 · owner: Security
- 02
Frozen artifact
2026-07-18 · v3.2
SHA-256 8d70…2a91
- 03
Question / claim
Privileged access
Buyer question Q-12
- 04
Evidence / citation
§4.2 · pp. 11–12
Mapped with source date
- 05
Human adjudication
Partial support
Owner confirmation required
HUMAN RELEASE GATE
- 06
Final pack
Bounded response
Released after confirmation
The delivery has eight controlled stages.
02
Evidence boundary
The transfer route, sensitivity, model use, retention and deletion are agreed before files move.
03
Inventory and freeze
Accepted files are listed, hashed and kept tied to source identity, date and owner.
04
Candidate retrieval
Questions are normalised and relevant source candidates are proposed. Retrieval is not a final answer.
05
Contradiction and age review
Stale, conflicting, unsupported and assertion-only material is marked for adjudication.
06
Human adjudication
A named operator reviews material statuses, citations and wording. Specialist conclusions are escalated.
07
Customer confirmation
The customer confirms facts, owners and external commitments before release.
08
Compilation and integrity
Internal paths and prohibited claims are removed; the archive and manifest are checked for alteration.
The rehearsal is useful because it showed where automation stops.
The retrieval result supports automation of evidence preparation. The status result prohibits autonomous assurance. Civitas therefore publishes the human gate instead of hiding it.
- 28 / 28
- fictional evidence files ingested without omission
- 96.4%
- top-three candidate retrieval relevance
- 19 / 28
- raw statuses changed during human adjudication
- 16
- primary customer-safe delivery artifacts
- 1
- controlled file alteration detected by integrity verification
Responsibility remains divided.
- Deterministic tools
- inventory, hashes, indexes, manifests and archive checks
- Model assistance
- query suggestions, candidate comparison, drafting and contradiction leads
- Civitas operator
- scope, adjudication, redaction, escalation and release recommendation
- Customer factual owner
- facts, commitments, source ownership and final submission
- Qualified professional
- specialist control, legal, privacy or audit judgment where the scope requires it
- Auditor or certification body
- formal audit, assurance, certification and accredited opinion
Local-first is an operating choice, not a slogan.
Evidence can be processed on a governed local workstation or a customer-controlled environment by agreement. Strict-local, redacted-hybrid and approved-cloud modes have different quality and confidentiality trade-offs. No external model processing is permitted without written customer approval.
What the integrity check does—and does not do
It can show that a delivered file changed after the manifest was created. It cannot establish that the source was truthful, that a control operated effectively or that an organisation is compliant.