Why this module directs rather than aggregates

The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations is the reference standard for ethical OSINT. Two of its principles are load-bearing here:

• Principle 1 — Do No Harm. An investigator's work should not increase risk to the individuals it touches, including those listed in registries and their family members.
• Principle 6 — Ethical Evidence Use. Public-record data should be used for the purpose for which it was disclosed, with the protections and disclaimers attached at the source preserved.

Building a separate aggregated index of registry records would violate both. It creates a fresh attack surface (single point of compromise, easier bulk download, harder to retract corrections), strips away each agency's legal disclaimer, and increases misuse risk — vigilante targeting, harassment of family members, confusion of namesakes, redistribution after offenders are de-listed.

Most state registry sites carry explicit terms-of-use restrictions that prohibit redistribution, scraping, or use for “any commercial purpose, vigilante action, or to harass.” California, Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts all carry variations of this language on their landing pages or disclaimers.

We could probably write a robots-respecting scraper that stays inside the rules. We choose not to — the small product wins are not worth the harm calculus or the legal exposure for a public-interest project.

The Safety module is a curated directory of pointers:

• One canonical link per state to the agency's official site
• A one-line note on what tier or level of registrants each state publicly exposes (e.g. “Massachusetts Level 2 + Level 3 only; Level 1 is not publicly accessible”)
• A citation link to that agency's about/disclaimer page
• For nationwide search: NSOPW.gov, the U.S. Department of Justice's federated search that queries every jurisdiction in real time.

We don't cache, scrape, or redistribute anything. Every search executes against the authoritative source, where the data is current and disclaimers are intact.

Including NSOPW.gov as the recommended starting point on /safety is consistent with Berkeley Protocol Principle 1, not a contradiction of it. NSOPW is operated by the U.S. Department of Justice under SORNA (the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act). It is an official government redirector — the search query you submit is fanned out to each jurisdiction's own registry in real time, and results are returned with the originating agency's disclaimers attached.

That distinction matters. A third-party aggregator (private people-search sites, data brokers) caches records, strips disclaimers, ranks jurisdictions inconsistently, and persists data after agencies de-list it. NSOPW does none of those things. Linking to it is structurally identical to linking to a single state registry — just one click further removed.

California, Florida, Texas, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts have public-facing registry sites that meet our standards for adding a richer integration card on /safety: they expose unambiguous tier or status information, publish stable URLs that survive site redesigns, and have an agency disclaimer page we can cite directly. For these five we add a TruthMark integration card with the agency name, public-tier coverage note, and citation link.

For the remaining 45 states, the District of Columbia, and the 5 U.S. territories, we list the official deep-link only. Some run on third-party platforms (OffenderWatch, iCrimeWatch) where it would be unsafe to publish our own characterization of tier rules without confirming them against state law. Some don't publish a clear tier model at all. Rather than guess, we send you straight to the agency that has the answer.

We expect to expand fuller integration as more states publish stable public APIs or scrapeable directories with documented disclaimers. Each addition has to clear two bars: technically feasible (we can fetch tier and status data without violating the jurisdiction's terms of use) and ethically defensible (Berkeley Protocol Principles 1 and 6 still hold).

This is the most important caveat. Public registries are the small minority of cases where someone has been convicted and fits a state's tier rules.

• About 90% of children sexually abused are abused by someone the family already knows — most abuse is never reported, and most abusers are never prosecuted (RAINN).
• States vary wildly in what they publish. Florida and Texas publish all registrants; Massachusetts and Rhode Island publish only the higher-risk tiers.
• Records can be out of date — addresses change, statuses get updated, individuals get de-listed. The official source always has the freshest data.
• Registries don't indicate ongoing risk. They indicate historical conviction status under each state's registration rules.

Where TruthMark may eventually do more is on the SORNA enforcement side: tooling that helps families understand registration compliance status (a federally-required signal that today is fragmented across state systems) and that supports authorized enforcement workflows. That's a separate build with its own access controls, not part of this directory.