A declaration of evidentiary integrity

I. Preamble

The scan is the evidence. A screenshot of a scan is a picture of the evidence; a written summary is one witness's account of it. Cases turn on what the imaging shows, and imaging deserves what every other exhibit gets: the original bytes, a record of who touched them, and a way to prove both to someone with no reason to trust the vendor holding them.

II. What the system does

A matter claims the studies it rests on. Every consequential action in a matter lands on an append-only ledger with a closed vocabulary of actions; nothing updates a ledger row, and nothing deletes one. Identity quarantine holds a study whose patient identity does not match the matter out of the timeline, out of every share link and out of every export until a person releases it — and a link's scope is resolved at read time, so quarantine reaches links minted before it. Under a protective order the share envelope hardens: watermark on, download off, whatever was asked. The original bytes of every study are kept as received, so a production ships what was received.

III. The proof

Each matter's ledger carries a SHA-256 hash chain: every entry's hash covers every entry before it, so a ledger that has been edited no longer matches its own chain. Nightly, each chain head that has moved is timestamped by DigiCert's RFC 3161 time-stamping authority, and the authority's signed token is stored verbatim — byte for byte, exactly as it arrived.

With that token and the authority's public certificates, anyone can prove the ledger's age without trusting Slicefield:

openssl ts -verify -in anchor.tsr \
  -digest <chain-head-hash> -sha256 \
  -CAfile tsa-ca.pem

Where doubt is expected, proof is embedded — and independently verifiable.

IV. Limits

This system does not make bad evidence good; it preserves what it was given. It does not replace counsel's judgment about what the imaging means or whether it is admissible. An anchor proves when a record existed, not who made it. Where the system cannot prove a thing, it says so rather than implying it.