Decision Accountability Documentation System (DADS)

Status: Frozen at Phase 6 (scrutiny-ready)

Reference tag: v6.0-overlay

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What DADS Is

The Decision Accountability Documentation System (DADS) is governance-grade documentation infrastructure designed to preserve institutional truth.

DADS exists to make system decisions, rationale, known risks, and human accountability durable across time, personnel change, audits, litigation, and scrutiny without enforcing behavior, rewriting history, or automating judgment.

DADS answers, credibly and immutably:

• Why does this system exist the way it does?
• Who made or approved this decision?
• What risks were knowingly accepted, and by whom?
• What was known at the time the decision was made?

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What DADS Is Not

DADS does not:

• Prevent cyberattacks
• Enforce compliance
• Certify correctness or legality
• Monitor people or productivity
• Generate or fabricate rationale
• Rewrite or delete history
• Act as a black-box authority
• Use AI for interpretation, judgment, or record generation

Critical boundary: DADS does not certify correctness only accountability and truthfulness of record.

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Core Governance Rule

Append-Only Truth Rule

• Records are never edited to change meaning
• Corrections require new records with explicit supersession
• Original records remain visible permanently

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How to Scrutinize DADS (Zero Trust Review)

DADS includes a program overlay that supports:

• validate
• bundle (offline scrutiny package)
• verify (hash + re-validation)

See:

• docs/EXTERNAL_SCRUTINY_GUIDE.md (canonical review protocol)
• overlay/dads.ps1 (executable overlay)

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Phase Model (Authoritative)

• Phase 0 Foundation (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 1 Validation Rules (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 1.5 Minimal Validator (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 2 Architecture & Lifecycle (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 2.1 Threat Model (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 2.2 Failure Modes & Misuse Analysis (Complete, Locked)
• Phase 3 Scope/Taxonomy/Validator Proposals (Locked)
• Phase 4 Enactment Planning (Complete)
• Phase 5 Minimal Enactment (MVE) (Complete)
• Phase 6 Program Overlay (Complete; tag v6.0-overlay)

Phases beyond 6 are not started as build work.

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One-Sentence Essence

DADS preserves institutional truth by making system decisions, rationale, and human accountability durable across time, people, and scrutiny.