Export documents are factual records, not legal instruments

Status: Accepted

Date: 2026-10-06

Amends ADR-0010: the Certification is no longer the cover sheet extended with signature rules. It is an operator statement with no signature line. Supersedes the goal of a template for a person to sign in docs/agents/osint-investigation-standards.md, which now describes a factual export statement instead.

Context

Until this decision, certification.html was titled Certificate of authenticity, said it was offered under Federal Rule of Evidence 902(13) and 902(14) or the equivalent rule of the forum, and printed a dashed box asking counsel to supply the legal wording. Both it and report.html ended with a signature and date line. Issue #848 tracked the placeholder as blocked on counsel.

That framing had three problems. A sworn declaration under 28 USC 1746 or a Rule 902(13) certification is a statement by a qualified person about their own knowledge of a process, so software cannot supply it and counsel drafts it per case regardless of what the page prints. Citing a United States rule by number on every export cut against the civil-society audience in ADR-0029 and was wrong for every non-US reader. And a document headed "certificate" that visibly waits for its legal wording lowered a reader's trust in the whole package.

Hunchly, the closest comparable tool, ships MHTML captures, SHA-256 hashes, a per-file GPG signature and the public key. Its reports are listings of pages and notes. No exported document carries a certificate, an affidavit template, or admissibility wording. Its Evidence Guide explains each mechanism and the ways it can be challenged, and says the investigator may be called as a fact witness.

Decision

Both documents in an Evidence Package are factual records of the package. certification.html is headed Export statement. It records the tool and version, the capture and hashing process, the trusted-time and entry-signature results, the signing key, and the operator's self-asserted identity, and says in one sentence that it is a factual record and not a legal declaration. report.html keeps its first-person operator statement and drops the sworn-declaration notice and the signature block. Neither document cites an evidence rule, prints a signature line, or reserves space for legal wording.

Any certification, declaration or affidavit a forum requires is drafted outside Birdbrain by the person who will sign it, using these documents and VERIFY.md as the facts it cites.

The shared stylesheet is plain: normal-case labels, hairline rules, ordinary heading sizes, and text sections that flow across pages. The package file name certification.html and the glossary term Certification are unchanged, because renaming them would change the package layout that historical packages and the verifier depend on.

Evidence impact

1. Investigation need, baseline, and threat. Operators need export documents a reader trusts at first sight. The governing baseline remains ADR-0004. The threat is misleading framing, not a change to captured bytes.
2. Supported claim. The change supports only the claim that the export documents describe the package accurately. It removes an implied claim that the package satisfies any evidence rule.
3. Evidence and custody effects. Original, derivative, activity, actor, and custody semantics do not change. The operator identity fields remain optional, self-asserted text.
4. Verification and failure behavior. Capture, export, and standalone verification behavior do not change. The two documents remain covered by the unsigned index only, as before. A test asserts the placeholder, the rule citation, the old title, and the signature grid are absent from a generated package.
5. Safety effects. Removing the rule citation reduces the risk that an operator presents a package as satisfying a rule it does not address. Existing privacy and operator-safety duties remain.
6. Formats and compatibility. No schema, package layout, or manifest behavior changes. The pre-scope fixture package keeps its original documents and still verifies.
7. Validation. The certification, export, report-invariant and package-verification test files pass, and the full preflight is green at the change's head.
8. Remaining obligations. Operators and deploying organizations remain responsible for any certification, notice procedure, testimony and case-specific admissibility.

Consequences

• Issue #848 closes without legal wording. The export path has no counsel dependency.
• docs/agents/osint-investigation-standards.md describes a factual export statement rather than a certification template for a person to sign. ADR-0010 remains the historical record of the "cover sheet with signature rules" design; this ADR controls where the two differ.
• A future request for a document a person signs, or one written for a specific rule, is a new decision, and should start from the question of who signs it and in which forum, not from the export code.
• The Court exhibit preset name in the export dialog is outside this decision and remains as ADR-0010 describes it.