# Research standards, provenance, and update protocol

**Established:** 2026-10-14. **Scope:** January 5–6, 2021 pipe-bomb investigation; security operations and contracts; FCS Global Advisors / First Coast Security and associated leads.

## Claim categories

- **Primary-document statement:** What an identifiable official filing, contract, contemporaneous document, transcript, or authenticated record actually says. Record page/section, exact legal party, date, and URL. The statement may itself be inaccurate.
- **Reported claim:** A secondary publication or previously prepared research summary describes an event or relationship; cite the original report and note limitations.
- **User-supplied lead:** Information supplied in chat, including copied LinkedIn biographies and descriptions of social-media threads, pending independent corroboration.
- **Analytical inference:** Explicitly reasoned interpretation of sourced facts; must state assumptions and alternative explanations.
- **Open hypothesis:** A proposition for testing, not a finding.
- **Negative search result:** No record identified within a specified set of searches; never represent this as proof of absence.

## Verification status

Use `not independently rechecked in this import` for all source links transcribed from prior conversation context unless a source was actually opened and inspected during this import. Do not label an unreviewed link “verified.” Preserve confidence separately from retrieval status.

For each material claim, log the entity, exact statement, source ID, source type, publication/event date, retrieval date (if any), status, confidence, contrary evidence, and gaps. Preserve contradictory accounts.

## Entity identity and relationship rules

1. Distinguish **First Coast Security Solutions, Inc.**, **First Coast Security Services, Inc.**, **FCS – Investigative Division, LLC**, **FCS Global Advisors** (brand/organization name, legal status unresolved), and **JMC Global Advisors, LLC**. A shared acronym does not prove a common corporate obligor.
2. Keep legal entity, assumed name/DBA, division, ownership, officer, employee, board/advisor, contractor, and social contact as different relationship types.
3. A tag, follow, reply, photograph, industry overlap, or shared venue does **not** establish employment, board membership, contracting, or criminal involvement.
4. A government facility's street address is not interchangeable with an adjacent building or different agency's space.
5. Contract ceiling ≠ obligated dollars ≠ disbursed dollars. Parent IDIQ ≠ task order. Facility clearance ≠ individual clearance.
6. Distinguish an allegation in charging documents from a conviction or adjudicated fact.

## Dates and locations

Preserve exact dates and local time zones; do not infer missing times. Where an incident location is an investigation subject, preserve known street address and agency/operator. Do not equate a contract's historical term with presence on January 5, 2021 without evidence of active coverage and personnel.

## Source preservation

- Keep a stable source ID in [source register](../sources/source-register.md).
- Prefer primary source and archived capture links, record title, publication date, page number, and document ID.
- Original evidence should be stored separately from notes and extracts. No unsourced paraphrases should be attributed to an original document.
- Avoid uploading personally sensitive records or making unfounded allegations about identifiable people.

## Git workflow

Add or update canonical dossiers under `node/`, then link from `reports/`, `timeline/`, `evidence/`, and `leads/`. Use narrow commits and verify the committed tree. No force-push, silent deletions, or wholesale replacement of source documents.

**Provenance:** Adapted from the user-provided project file `Rewrite Forgejo Archive Prompt.txt`. This is an editorial implementation, not a verbatim copy of that file.