The leak this repository had was not carelessness with a secret. It was
somebody reaching for a real name because it was the example in front of
them -- a fixture built from a live database, an envelope pasted out of a
running container, a help text written while looking at the actual group.
Three different people-shaped mistakes, none of which a rule about "be
careful" would have stopped.
So it is a gate. The hard part is that the thing being checked must not
contain the list of what to refuse, or the check *is* the leak. It reads the
names at run time from outside: the photo pack's manifest, the message
database, the local .env. It never prints the word it matched, because this
output reaches CI logs. On a machine with none of that private data it says
"shapes only" out loud rather than passing quietly, and CI enforces the half
that needs nothing -- phone numbers, uuids and Signal group ids, compared
against an allowlist of values invented for the fixtures.
It runs on staged files, on the commit message -- where two of the leaks
actually travelled -- and over the whole tree in CI.
It paid for itself twice before it was wired up. The live test group's id was
in tests/test_config.py in two spellings, and truncated in three more files,
after four rounds of grepping by hand had pronounced the tree clean -- nobody
thinks to grep for base64. Then it refused the commit that introduced it,
because DOCS-privacy.md had used a real name as the example of a name.
An allowlist line may be scoped to one file, which is how the given names
that are also popes stay legal in popes.json and refused in every fixture
that has no business carrying them. The threshold is three characters,
because one of this group's given names is three characters long.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017w1HZ3cZ7neL3rFdQ6VMBA
Per-person photo commands, where the mechanism is public and the album is
not. Nothing identifying is in this repository: who the people are, what
fires their photos and which file shows whom all live in one directory
outside it, and the tests, the docs and the offline e2e run use three
invented people instead.
Several names in one message intersect -- "!alfa beta" is a photo with both
-- and where an entry offers a choice the bot picks among the readings that
actually have a photo, so a question the album could answer is not refused.
A combination nobody photographed gets one line rather than silence, which
from the group's side is indistinguishable from a broken bot.
Scoping is enforced in the dispatcher, not in the handler: a command the
group is not allowed resolves to nothing, so it is not answered, not counted
as a command, and never named in a log line outside its own groups. A
handler that quietly returned would leak all three. Commands are named by
pseudonym (pack:p1), so the journal and command_uses say somebody asked for
a photo and nothing about whose.
Video works: the attachment goes out as data:video/mp4;filename=...;base64,
which is the container's own spelling, read off its /swagger/doc.json.
Told it is a photo, Signal renders a clip as an unplayable file.
tool/tagger.py serves one page on loopback to fill the album in -- names are
typed into the page, never as arguments, and it prints how many photos each
command would have when it stops, because a command with zero is dead on
arrival.
Also renames the real people who were still sitting in the stats test
fixtures. They remain in the history; the point is that nothing new is
added to it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017w1HZ3cZ7neL3rFdQ6VMBA
