Ananke's Mirror

A Distributed-Provenance Instrument for Documenting and Analyzing Public Positions on Known, Legally-Sanctioned Activity **A White Paper** *Draft for discussion. Subject to revision.*  Abstract Many categories of activity in public life are legally sanctioned and broadly known to exist, yet are not, as a matter of convention, disclosed or foregrounded by the public figures who participate in or position themselves around them. Examples include certain procurement relationships, advisory affiliations, intelligence- and security-adjacent authorities, and policy commitments that are exercised in practice but rarely campaigned on. The result is an accountability gap that is not secrecy in the legal sense — nothing is hidden that is required to be revealed — but is opacity in the practical sense: a public cannot easily understand where its officials and prominent public actors *stand* on activity it has a legitimate interest in. This paper specifies an instrument that closes...

The visual layer: parallax as the cipher The "surface" is an arrangement of bodies and innocuous objects in a real space — a plaza, a queue, a market, a march. The reconstruction mechanism is **occlusion and alignment**, both of which change with sightline. Four concrete encoding methods: **Occlusion-gated tokens.** Each participant carries something semantically neutral — a colored bag, a hat, a banal sign. Scattered through the crowd these read as random noise from the civilian angle. From the keyed vantage, depth causes most tokens to vanish behind bodies, and only a specific visible subset remains — and *that* subset is the message. It's a physical moiré: the right alignment filters the field down to signal. **Collinearity encoding.** From the correct point, depth collapses and certain people *line up* — heads forming a row, a color sequence reading cleanly left-to-right because foreground and background flatten into apparent adjacency. From any other poin...