# RAM-Charter-Content Leak -- Hard-Error Reference (E6)

**Owner:** Audit Charter Lock. Private Evaluator.
**Error class:** `ram-charter-content-leaked-into-audit-charter`.
**Severity:** HARD ERROR -- never a warning, never a halt. A detected leak quarantines the audit and reopens Phase 5 isolation review.
**Rationale:** RAM's Charter Lock and the Audit Charter Lock are architecturally independent. Content overlap means their boundaries stop being independent variables and the dual-system premise collapses. The Evaluator's verdict on RAM would be partly determined by RAM's own scope choices -- exactly the failure the two-library architecture prevents.

## What counts as a leak

1. **Direct textual overlap.** N-gram match at length 12+, whitespace/punctuation ignored.
2. **Concept-term collision with shared operational meaning.** Identically-named terms with identical operational definitions copied across charters (vocabulary sharing alone is NOT a leak).
3. **Cross-reference.** Either charter citing the other as normative source -- architecturally forbidden.
4. **Derivative drafting.** Audit Charter authored by editing a RAM Charter copy rather than the template. Content-hash lineage reveals this.

**Legitimate overlaps (NOT leaks):** ordinary language; independent citation of shared external standards (both citing Pawson 2013 is fine; citing the other charter's citation is a leak); parallel structure with independently-written content.

## Detection

Owned by the **Isolation Verifier** (E1), which runs inter-library content-overlap checks as part of its invariant sweep. The Audit Charter Lock does NOT run its own scan -- that would require reading RAM's Charter Lock, which is architecturally forbidden.

**This skill's role:**
- At lock time (Phase A step 6), emit the Audit Charter's content hash and structural fingerprint to the Isolation Verifier.
- On amendment, repeat fingerprint emission.
- Subscribe to the Isolation Verifier's `ram-audit-charter-overlap` alarm channel; on receipt, trigger remediation.

**The Isolation Verifier** runs overlap diff against pre-agreed thresholds and never exposes RAM Charter content to this skill -- only the overlap signal and fingerprints.

## Remediation (ordered, non-negotiable)

1. **Quarantine.** Mark `audit_id` `quarantined-isolation-breach`. No further operations. In-flight operations halted and tagged.
2. **Write HARD ERROR Ledger entry:** `{ audit_id, charter_version, overlapping_fingerprint_ids, isolation_verifier_alarm_id, timestamp }`.
3. **Escalate to operator** with fingerprint-level evidence (not content-level) and recommended redraft scope.
4. **Notify Self-Audit Resistance Monitor.** Leaks are integrity events; may indicate systematic over-coupling in drafting.
5. **Reopen Phase 5 isolation review.** Ticket opens automatically; leak detection is evidence the isolation architecture has a gap or was not enforced.
6. **Redraft from the intake template.** No edit-in-place. Amended-charter ceremony does NOT apply -- the existing charter is structurally invalid, not merely out of date. Redraft, re-intake, re-lock as if starting fresh.

## What remediation does NOT permit

- Scrubbing overlapping text and re-locking. The drafting process is the issue, not the surface text.
- Operator override. Unlike Signals 3 and 4 (non-overridable at scope-creep layer but resolvable via amendment), a leak is non-overridable at all levels -- no operator authority to grant coupled charters.
- Continuing the audit under the existing charter while a new one is drafted. Quarantine is absolute.

## Why stricter than other hard errors

This is the only error class that automatically reopens Phase 5 isolation review. Every other failure in SKILL.md is a scope-creep mechanism the architecture anticipates and contains; a leak is failure of the containment architecture itself. Treating it as runtime-recoverable would normalize failure of the two-library premise -- exactly what the architecture exists to prevent.
