Principle
A vendor does not become a governmental fiduciary merely by contracting with government, and government's duties remain nondelegable. Vendor obligations arise from law, the solicitation, the contract and direct statutory duties.
What the specification requires
- Mandatory capability disclosure. Every information domain the product can read, query, correlate, infer from, export or retain; every administrator, support, service-account, agentic and emergency capability; telemetry, training and onward disclosure; and dormant or license-activatable features.
- Authority schedule. For each material capability: the governmental function, legal authority, originating purpose, information domains, permitted operations, consequence, duration and boundary.
- Architecture requirements. Twenty requirements, including: capability may not materially exceed legitimate authority; cross-purpose capability must be technically unavailable through ordinary access; administrative privilege may not be a universal back door; AI and model state inherit the legitimacy boundary; bundled capability that is not required is removed or disabled; and conformance is assessed on the deployed configuration, not the product family.
- Acceptance testing. Negative-capability testing and red-team reconstruction attempts.
- Exit rights. Portability, transition, deletion or return, disposition of learned artifacts, and termination.
Evaluation questions
- What is the most extensive individualized or relational knowledge the proposed system can construct under ordinary permissions?
- Which of those capabilities does the governmental function actually need?
- What legal authority supports each capability, and what legitimate informational authority justifies its scope?
- Could a less informationally powerful architecture perform the same function?
- Does commercial bundling create capability beyond authority?
- Could an authorized insider, acting entirely within granted permissions, construct a comprehensive cross-purpose profile?