PERSONALIZED TRIPWIRES PROTOCOL

Personalized Tripwires Protocol¶

Per-Citizen Governance Boundaries on the Browser Shell / PAW¶

Cycle: C-284 (Stage 1 shipped to PAW) Status: Protocol Spec v1 (Stage 1) · Canonical CC0 Public Domain

0. Purpose¶

The substrate's global tripwires — EVE's narrative-overreach detectors, ATLAS's strategic drift monitors, ZEUS's verification floors — are universal safeguards. They protect the substrate as a whole.

But a citizen or operator also needs personal boundaries: "alert me if my own reasoning window exceeds duplication threshold X" or "hold my journal submission if GI drops below Y at commit time." These are not substrate-level events — they are personal integrity contracts between the user and their own civic footprint.

This protocol defines the personalized tripwire primitive: a user-owned, locally-managed alert and hold mechanism that runs beside the global substrate safeguards, not against them.

1. Core doctrine¶

• Global tripwires protect the substrate. They cannot be disabled by any individual.
• Personal tripwires protect the citizen from themselves. They are owned, configured, and mutable by the citizen.
• Personal tripwires never relax global ones. They can only be stricter, never looser. "My personal GI floor is 0.80" is valid when the global EVE floor is 0.70. "My personal GI floor is 0.60" is rejected by the client.
• Personal tripwires are auditable. Their trigger history is recorded in the citizen's own journal, with attested timestamps.
• Personal tripwires do not halt the substrate. A personal hold pauses only the triggering citizen's own pending actions.

2. Where it lives¶

Stage 1 (shipped C-284) lives in ATLAS-PAW (atlas-paw), the operator's instrument panel. Stage 2 will generalize to the Browser Shell (mobius-browser-shell) so any citizen running the shell can configure personal tripwires against their own journal and pending commits.

Implementation surfaces:

Stage 1 is client-side only — PAW stores personal tripwires in its local Key-Value store (per-user) and renders alerts when thresholds fire. Stage 2 adds a Terminal-backed API so tripwires persist across devices for the citizen.

3. Tripwire model¶

A personal tripwire is a scoped contract:

PersonalTripwire {
  id: string                     # uuid
  owner: string                  # citizen_id or operator handle
  label: string                  # "GI floor for my commits"
  scope: "journal" | "commit" | "attestation" | "snapshot"
  trigger: {
    kind: "gi_below" | "mii_below" | "mode_change" | "duplication_above" | "attestation_timeout"
    threshold: number | string   # kind-dependent
    sustain_cycles?: number      # optional: require N cycles at threshold
  }
  action: "alert" | "hold" | "alert_and_hold"
  enabled: boolean
  created_at: string
  last_fired_at: string | null
  fire_count: number
}

Scope governs what the tripwire is allowed to inspect:

• journal — my own pending journal entries
• commit — my own outgoing commits (via PAW's commit lane)
• attestation — Seals my operator/agent role would attest
• snapshot — the substrate snapshot the user is consuming right now

Action:

• alert — banner + notification, no behavioral change
• hold — pause the triggering action, wait for user confirmation
• alert_and_hold — both

4. Global-vs-personal precedence¶

global_safeguard passed?  ──┐
                            ▼
         ┌────────────────────────────────┐
         │ personal_tripwire passes also? │
         └────────────────┬───────────────┘
                          ▼
            both pass ────► proceed
            global fails ─► BLOCK (substrate-level, universal)
            personal fails ► HOLD (only this citizen's action)

A personal tripwire cannot bypass a global safeguard. It can only add an additional (stricter) condition. Validation at configuration time enforces this:

• gi_below: 0.60 when global floor is 0.70 → rejected (too loose)
• gi_below: 0.80 when global floor is 0.70 → accepted (stricter)

5. Configuration UI (Stage 1, PAW)¶

PAW ships with four preset tripwires at first run:

1. GI floor for my commits — hold my commits if GI < 0.80 for 3 cycles. Default: enabled=false.
2. Attestation timeout alert — notify me if any Sentinel times out on a Seal I'm tracking. Default: enabled=true.
3. Mode change alert — notify me when substrate mode transitions green↔yellow↔red. Default: enabled=true.
4. Duplication ceiling — warn if my journal's content_signature has appeared > 3 times in the last 5 cycles. Default: enabled=true.

All presets are user-editable. Custom tripwires can be added via the PAW tripwires configuration panel.

6. Fire history¶

Every fire of a personal tripwire is recorded:

PersonalTripwireFire {
  tripwire_id: string
  owner: string
  fired_at: string
  context_snapshot: {
    cycle: string
    gi: number
    mode: "green" | "yellow" | "red"
    mii_self: number | null
  }
  triggering_event: {
    kind: string                 # matches tripwire.trigger.kind
    observed_value: number | string
    threshold: number | string
  }
  action_taken: "alert" | "hold" | "alert_and_hold"
  resolution: "confirmed" | "dismissed" | "expired" | null
  resolved_at: string | null
}

Stage 1: fire history lives in PAW local KV. Stage 2: mirrored to the citizen's own journal with daily archive to the Substrate under journals/citizens/{citizen_id}/tripwires/.

7. Relationship to global EVE tripwires¶

EVE owns substrate-level tripwires:

• narrative-overreach
• cycle-window duplication across all agents
• attestation self-approval prevention
• emergency-mode governance lockout

These are not user-configurable and fire independently of any personal tripwire state. When EVE fires globally, all citizens see it in the snapshot; their personal tripwires do not "also" fire — they are downstream.

The symmetric relationship: ATLAS-PAW's personal tripwires are to EVE what a home smoke alarm is to the city fire department. Both necessary; different scopes; they don't replace each other.

8. API surface (Stage 2 — not yet shipped)¶

GET    /api/tripwires/personal              List mine
POST   /api/tripwires/personal              Create (validates vs global floors)
GET    /api/tripwires/personal/:id          Read one
PATCH  /api/tripwires/personal/:id          Update (validates vs global floors)
DELETE /api/tripwires/personal/:id          Soft-delete
GET    /api/tripwires/personal/:id/fires    Fire history (paginated)
POST   /api/tripwires/personal/:id/resolve  Resolve a held action

All authed with citizen session token. Writes are rate-limited per citizen (10/hour soft, 50/hour hard).

9. Doctrine (short)¶

Global safeguards keep the cathedral standing. Personal tripwires keep the citizen from walking off the edge.

Neither replaces the other. Both listen; only the citizen configures the second.

"You are allowed to set your own perimeter inside the cathedral's walls."