Detection continuum · Rung 5 of 5
5 · Evidentiary
“Will this hold up?” Law enforcement, courts and regulators.
- Evidence standard
- Chain of custody, a reproducible method, known error rates, and survival under cross-examination.
- Cost of a wrong call
- Liberty, large judgments, or the credibility of the whole field.
What it can and cannot claim
Can claim
- This record was collected this way, stored this way, and has not changed, which anyone can check offline.
- This method, run again on the same inputs, gives the same output, and here is its known error rate.
Cannot claim
- Admissibility. A court decides that, case by case. No court has examined a Silvector record.
- Any conclusion beyond what the method was validated for.
Error rates
Silvector publishes no measured detection error rate for this rung yet. Any number you see elsewhere on this site is labeled with its source, and none of them are ours. Under the Daubert standard, a method's known or potential error rate is one of the factors a US federal court weighs. A rung 5 record without one is not rung 5.
A valid error-rate statement at this rung includes:
- Known error rates with denominators, from a validation study another expert could repeat.
- The standards the method follows and whether it has been tested and peer reviewed.
Bias risks
- An authoritative-looking report can carry more weight than its method deserves. Say what the method cannot see.
What Silvector has at this rung
| Capability | State | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Offline verification of receipts against the published key, with no Silvector service in the loop | shipped | tools/cli/ag47.ts (ag47 verify --jwk), the quickstarts |
| CLI log checks (signed tree head, inclusion, consistency) against published keys; today they accept development keys only | planned | tools/cli/ag47.ts |
| Byte-identical replay of a receipt from its recorded inputs | shipped | packages/engine/src/engine.test.ts |
| Legal hold, custody log and methods appendix | planned | Lane A, AG4-400 |
How to escalate
Rung 5 is the top. The way forward from here is a court or regulator examining the record, which no Silvector record has been through yet.
Sources
- Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993)
- Federal Rule of Evidence 702
- Federal Rule of Evidence 902(13) and (14)
- ISO/IEC 27037:2012, identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence
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