Library
Library
Start with five everyday terms. The full list is underneath.
Start with these 5
Piece
A unit you move. Blue: the white pieces on the blue half.
Node
A glowing square in the center. Stand on one to take it.
Capture
Land on the other side's piece to take it off the board.
Turn
You move, then the computer moves. That pair is a turn.
King
Take the other side's king and the match ends. Keep yours.
All terms, A to Z
A
Agent
A model wrapped with tools, state, tasks, and permissions so it can carry out multi-step work. Its status reports are claims to verify.
All-party consent
A recording regime requiring every participant's consent. Commonly miscalled two-party consent, which is wrong whenever three people are talking.
Analysis
Breaking a claim into parts to see what is supported, what is inferred, and what is still missing.
Aperture
A gap in a conductive enclosure. Leakage is governed by aperture size relative to wavelength, which is why seams and closures usually decide real performance; the material must…
Apokalypsis
Lens #7, from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις (uncovering). It asks what the gaps in a record show. It does not turn gaps into a conspiracy.
Artificial urgency
A tempo attack: compress the decision cycle before provenance is finished.
Assessment
A reasoned evaluation based on available evidence and stated uncertainty.
Authorized push payment
A transfer the victim was manipulated into sending themselves. Generally outside the US consumer protections that cover unauthorized card use, which is why the payment method…
B
Base rate
How common something is in the population being searched. Any match, alert or test result is close to meaningless without it.
Baseline Reality
The minimum defensible set of claims, each tagged Observed, Corroborated, Inferred, Hypothesized, or Unknown. Unknown is a valid state.
Biological processor
The person doing the analysis. Sleep loss, intoxication, panic, rage, exhaustion, and overload degrade the product.
C
Causality
A supported mechanism linking cause to effect. Shared timing is not enough.
Chain of custody
The unbroken, documented record of who held an item of evidence, when, and what they did with it. A gap weakens the record and cannot be rebuilt from memory; US courts usually…
Chronark
Lens #9, a coined word from the Greek χρόνος (time) and ἀρχή (beginning, rule). It asks how the present situation came to be. Establish the sequence of events before calling…
Chronolocation
Establishing when material was captured from what is visible in it: shadow angle, weather, seasonal detail, events in frame.
Claim
The assertion being made. Isolate it before judging evidence, cause, or motive.
Cognition
Attention, memory, perception, and reasoning — the processor every influence technique is aimed at.
Cognitive resilience
The practiced ability to evaluate information under pressure without being steered by tempo, framing, or social proof.
Cognitive sovereignty
The capacity of citizens and institutions to distinguish reality from manipulation and act from verified information.
Cognitive warfare
Operations against how a mind or public interprets reality — selection, omission, timing, repetition, emotion, attention.
Confidence
Degree of support for an assessment. Confidence is not certainty.
Context removal
Cutting accurate material so its meaning changes. The words are real; the frame is new.
Context window
The amount of text a model can consider at once. What fell out of the window was not weighed.
Continental Army
On 14 June 1775 Congress resolved to raise ten companies of riflemen; the Army counts this as its birthday. That was more than a year before the Declaration.
Contradiction
Two claims or data points cannot both be true under the same conditions.
Corroboration
Independent sources supporting the same factual claim. Copies of one source are not independent.
Cued scanning
Deliberate brief environmental updates at transitions, with genuine rest between them. The evidence-supported alternative to continuous alertness.
Custodian
The body that holds the original record — a court docket, an archive, an agency. The best place to confirm authenticity.
D
Data minimization
Collecting only what the question requires. Material about uninvolved people is a liability the investigator chose to create.
Debit as Credit
Choosing “credit” at checkout with a debit card, or paying with a debit card that carries a card-network logo. The money still comes out of your bank account. Regulation E governs…
Decision pipeline
The path from attention to action. The Baseline Reality threat model treats that path as the attack surface.
Diagnosticity
How far an item of evidence distinguishes between hypotheses. Evidence consistent with all of them distinguishes none of them.
Dick Act
Militia Act of January 21, 1903. It organized the state militias as the National Guard under federal standards and funding.
Diffusion of benefits
The finding that crime prevention at one location can reduce crime at nearby unprotected locations — observed at about the same rate as displacement, its opposite.
Displacement
The movement of crime to another time, place, target or method following a prevention measure. Real, but found in only about a quarter of instances examined.
Duty to retreat
The requirement in some jurisdictions to take a safe avenue of escape before using deadly force. Its absence is what stand-your-ground describes. The castle doctrine is the…
E
F
Falsifiability
For every strong belief: what evidence would change it? If the answer is nothing, the model is closed.
Falsifier
The specific observation that would overturn a finding. A judgment with no falsifier is a position.
Framework
One of the ten ShadowBreak-SI™ analytical lenses. The number and the name stay paired.
Framing
Word choice and context that steer interpretation before evidence is weighed. The frame is not the fact.
G
Geolocation
Establishing where material was captured by matching several fixed features against reference imagery. Convergence, not resemblance.
H
Hash
A fixed-length digest of a file. With a collision-resistant algorithm such as SHA-256, recomputing it later and matching shows the bytes are unchanged.
High-Risk Email
An email address you give out at store keypads, loyalty sign-ups, public screens, and one-time merchants. Treat it as disposable. It is never the recovery address for your home…
Home Set
One checking account, one savings account, and one credit card that you use rarely and keep at home. They pay only true personal expenses. They are not a joint account, and never…
Hypervigilance
Persistent threat scanning: a clinical symptom, not a trainable skill. It is associated with more and wider scanning of ambiguous scenes, and raised arousal at neutral ones. It is…
Hypothesis
A proposed explanation that still requires testing. It is not a finding.
I
Identity pressure
Tying acceptance of a claim to group belonging. Belonging is not evidence.
Imminence
The self-defense element requiring that the threat be happening now rather than past or feared later. The first question in the structure, and the one most often failed.
Indicator
An observable event defined in advance that would confirm or refute a hypothesis. Written after the fact, it is hindsight.
Inference
A conclusion derived from observations or evidence. Reasonable inferences can still be wrong.
Influence operation
An effort to shape perception, belief, emotion, attention, or behavior. Messaging alone does not prove one.
Information diet
Selection of what you read, watch, and repeat. Choose sources the way you choose food: skip what has spoiled.
Information operation
The use of information and information systems to affect a target's decision-making. Messaging alone does not prove one.
K
Katorthoma
Lens #4, from the Greek κατόρθωμα (a right action, a success). It asks whether the design of a system actually produces the result it claims.
Krateros
Lens #5, from the Greek κρατερός (strong, stout, mighty). It asks what happens when a system is under stress, damaged, or only partly working.
L
LastPsyOp™
Lens #1. It asks what is trying to shape your perception, and by what means. It is not another name for ShadowBreak-SI™.
Likelihood
How probable a judgment is, stated from a fixed lexicon. Distinct from confidence, which is about the sourcing beneath it.
Local model
A model that runs on your own hardware rather than a remote service. Privacy is a property of the setup, not the weights alone.
M
MCP
Model Context Protocol: a standard for exposing tools and data to SI applications. A connected tool is a permission.
Militia
The people in arms under law. Today the organized militia is principally the National Guard; the unorganized militia is a legal class, not a standing unit.
Model
A simplified representation of a system. Useful when its limits are stated; dangerous when they are not.
Model routing
Choosing which model handles a task based on cost, speed, privacy, and capability.
N
Narrative
A framed story about events. Framing can be true, partial, or manipulative — the frame is not the evidence.
National Guard
Organized militia of the fifty states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands (54 total). The governor commands in State Active Duty or Title 32, and the President…
Noetikon
Lens #6, from the Greek νοητικός (of the intellect). It asks which model best explains the facts, and which hidden assumptions that model brings with it.
Nomosyne
Lens #8, a coined word from the Greek νόμος (law, custom). It asks which rule actually governs the situation: the rule as written, as interpreted, or as enforced.
O
Observation
Something measured, recorded, documented, or otherwise observed. It is not yet a cause.
One-party consent
A recording regime in which the consent of a single participant — which may be you — makes the recording lawful. The federal floor under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d).
Order of volatility
The sequence in which digital evidence is collected, most perishable first: memory before disk, disk before archives.
P
Pathway to violence
The behavioral progression — grievance, ideation, research and planning, preparation, breach, attack — used in threat assessment of a known person of concern over time. Not a…
Phainomenon
Lens #3, from the Greek φαινόμενον (that which appears). It asks what was actually observed, and what different causes could produce the same signal.
Pretexting
Obtaining records by pretending to be someone entitled to them. Separately prohibited for financial and telephone records.
Prompt injection
Untrusted content that tries to act as an instruction to an SI system. Content is data, not command.
Propaganda
Communication designed to promote a position, often by selective or emotionally loaded presentation.
Provenance
Where the information came from, and whether later layers still show that origin.
Psychological operation
A planned operation to convey selected information to foreign audiences in order to influence emotions, motives, or reasoning.
R
Radio horizon
The line-of-sight distance limit on VHF and UHF propagation, set by antenna height above terrain rather than transmitter power. The reason height beats watts.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Supplying retrieved documents to a model at answer time so the answer can be grounded and sourced.
Reranking
A second pass that reorders retrieved results by relevance. Order is a choice, not a fact about the corpus.
S
SAME
Specific Area Message Encoding, the system that lets a NOAA weather radio alert only for a chosen county rather than the whole broadcast area.
Satisficing
Stopping at the first explanation that adequately fits the facts, instead of generating and testing the alternatives.
Scope
The written boundary of a case: the question, the period, the entities, and the condition under which the work stops.
Selective Disclosure
Accurate facts chosen or ordered so the overall picture misleads. True parts, false whole.
Sentinel
Lens #2. It asks whether an institution does the job it claims, within the powers it actually holds. Incompetence is not proof of corruption.
ShadowBreak-SI™
The analytical system as a whole: the doctrine, the method, and a structured place to reason. It breaks a claim into parts. It does not try to persuade you, and it does not ask to…
Shielding effectiveness
The attenuation an enclosure provides, in decibels, at a stated frequency and measured by a stated method. A shielding claim without those three things is not a measurement.
Social proof
Treating what others appear to believe or do as evidence of what is right. Volume is not corroboration.
Sock puppet
A pseudonymous research account. Common, generally against platform terms, and part of the method record when used.
Source independence
Whether sources obtained the information separately rather than from a shared origin. Copies are not independent.
Source laundering
Hiding or swapping origin so a claim looks independently sourced. Hops on a chain are not corroboration.
Strategic communication
Coordinated messaging designed to advance an objective. Motive is not proof of falsehood.
Surface Set
The everyday accounts and cards you carry. Ideally they sit at a different bank from the home set. The goal is two layers, not a dozen banks.
Synthesis
Integrating multiple valid lenses without erasing which lens produced which finding. That is Syntheton™.
Syntheton
Lens #10, from the Greek σύνθετον (a compound). It combines the findings of the other lenses. It never claims a lens was run when it was not, and it keeps track of where each…
T
The Individual
The person a republic relies on: able to govern attention, body, and judgment. This lesson is civic training, not medical advice.
The Stack
The kit issued with the training: the ten lenses, the rules, the instruments, and the closeout. Any method borrowed from elsewhere is credited to its source, never renamed.
Token
The unit of text a model reads and writes, roughly a word fragment. Not an access credential.
U
Uncertainty
The acknowledged gap between what is known and what is claimed. Name it; do not fill it.
Unknown
A valid state: available information is insufficient. Inventing certainty is the error.
V
Vector search
Finding items whose embeddings are closest in meaning to a query. Nearby is not the same as true.
Verification
Checking a finding against the record before treating it as final. Generated text is a draft until this is done.
W
Write-blocker
A device that permits reads and intercepts writes, so examining media cannot alter it.