The Phase 4.5 amendment to the Independence hard rule crosses that rule
deliberately, and the crossing is defensible: bounded to Phase 4.5 and the
Phase 5 loop, the initial swarm stays blind, and it resolves a tension the
brief created itself by asking for exactly this mining of Phase-4 output.
The defect was the compensating-control claim. query-privacy-gate.mjs was
named as THE control for the crossing, but it inspects outbound query
CONTENT for paths, repo identifiers and secret-shaped strings. It cannot
prevent a local finding from steering an external agent's question. It
compensates the EGRESS risk; the BIAS risk was left with no control while
the text read as though it had one.
Both risks are now stated separately with the control that actually bears on
each:
Bias - structural, not a gate. The initial external swarm stays blind, so
an independent baseline exists BEFORE anything crosses; the
crossing only ADDS to that baseline; and at effort: high - the only
effort at which any of this runs - contrarian-researcher is forced
always-on, so the brief always carries an adversarial
counter-evidence pass over the result the crossed queries fed.
Egress - query-privacy-gate.mjs, unchanged, with its non-overridable
hard-block tier.
Fixed at both sites: the Hard rules entry and the Phase 4.5 paragraph that
repeated the same attribution.
A doc-consistency pin now fails if the amendment names the privacy gate as
the compensating control again, and requires it to name both
contrarian-researcher and the egress framing - so the two cannot quietly
re-merge.
Review finding 4888ae847240142933469d70bafb6a9c23b7b2eb (MINOR).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LuGhWAbWyRFBFeemfhxoVv
Kjell Tore Guttormsen
5f88385d2f