Sub rosa — "under the rose." The rose hung over a Roman council table meant: what is said here stays here. Confidentiality by mutual understanding; selective disclosure by architecture.
Subrosa is a privacy engineering suite that takes both halves of the privacy problem seriously: the cypherpunk half (privacy must be structural — built from cryptographic primitives that make over-disclosure impossible) and the regulatory half (statute-precise compliance mapping across 26 jurisdictions and sectoral regimes). Its thesis, enforced rather than asserted:
Compliance is a floor. Selective disclosure is the ceiling.
skills/ Nine Claude Code skills (SKILL.md + references/)
privacy-suite/ Router — diagnoses the need, sequences the others
threat-model-privacy/ IC-methodology adversary profiling (7 archetypes)
data-minimization/ Field-level schema audits, P1–P7, remediation vocabulary
consent-language/ Notices, cookie consent, rights pages, breach letters
privacy-impact-assessment/ DPIA/PIA workflow, regulator-ready output
opsec-review/ Inferential-leakage audit before anything ships
redact/ PII/credential/wallet scrubbing (regex + crypto patterns)
metadata-hygiene/ EXIF/document/AV/archive/git metadata stripping
privacy-architecture/ The build layer: ZKP, anonymous credentials, blind
signatures, commitments, stealth addresses, PSI/MPC,
DP, TEE, mixnets — with the Statutory Dissolution Map
taxonomy/ The normalized regulatory layer
regulatory-taxonomy.md Frozen axis set (A0–A12) + sectoral profile (S0–S5)
regulatory-taxonomy--*.md 26 jurisdiction/sectoral records, citation-backed
--floor.md Strictest-regime-wins: build to this, comply everywhere
--conflicts.md C1–C7: where regimes are mutually incompatible
--arch-rollup.md Which obligations dissolve under selective disclosure
.fable/ Methodology provenance: lessons, reconciliation log,
dogfood tests, phase prompts
The taxonomy layer normalizes every regime — GDPR/UK, PIPEDA + Quebec Law 25, CCPA/CPRA, LGPD, POPIA, PIPL, the PDPA family, APPI, DPDPA, the APPs, nFADP, KR PIPA, and sectoral overlays (HIPAA, GLBA, COPPA, BIPA, FERPA, ePrivacy, NIS2, DORA, EU AI Act) — onto one frozen axis set. Every cell carries a statutory citation or an explicit [UNVERIFIED] flag, plus an enforcement-mode tag: ARCH-DISSOLVES (the duty never attaches to a well-designed system), ARCH-SATISFIES (a technical measure discharges it), PROCEDURAL (only paper satisfies it), or ARCH-MANDATES (the law demands the architecture itself — AU APP 2's anonymity option, BIPA § 15(c)'s profit ban, India's child-tracking prohibition).
The architecture layer builds what the tags promise. Its Statutory Dissolution Map (skills/privacy-architecture/references/regulatory-dissolution.md) runs the bridge in the other direction: pick a primitive, read off exactly which obligations it dissolves, with record citations — so an ADR's compliance claim is auditable, not vibes. Roll-up finding: ~60% of tagged obligations across all records dissolve or discharge architecturally; the procedural remainder is five workflows of paper.
Every statutory claim was either traced to a grounding source or flagged — never guessed. The discipline caught real errors that a hand-authored reference had carried confidently: a folkloric "72-hour" Quebec breach clock (the statute says promptly), a section-shifted POPIA condition table, a duplicated LGPD rights anchor, a conflated Swiss provision, an uncorroborated UAE penalty figure — and one entire superseded statute (Vietnam's Decree 13 → PDPL 91/2025). All corrections are logged with sources in .fable/reconciliation-log.md; a Currency Protocol (quarterly sweeps, supersession banners) keeps the records from rotting. The repo enforces its own invariants in CI: tools/validate.py verifies every cross-reference resolves, every skill's frontmatter is well-formed, and every record carries a current Current as of date — and prints the [UNVERIFIED] census so flag-debt is visible per commit.
Subrosa's design principle — privacy must be structural, not procedural — has a fifty-year lineage. The suite quotes and builds on all of it:
| Text | Author | Year | Core contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| "New Directions in Cryptography" | Diffie & Hellman | 1976 | Public key cryptography — made everything possible |
| "Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms" | David Chaum | 1981 | Mix networks — metadata unlinkability; ancestor of every mixnet |
| "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" | David Chaum | 1982 | Anonymous digital cash — first working implementation |
| "Security without Identification" | David Chaum | 1985 | Full philosophical and technical statement of privacy-by-architecture |
| "The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems" | Goldwasser, Micali & Rackoff | 1985 | Zero-knowledge formalized — proof without disclosure |
| "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" | Timothy C. May | 1988 | Political framework; crypto anarchy program |
| "Why I Wrote PGP" | Philip Zimmermann | 1991 | Cryptography as civil disobedience |
| "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" | Eric Hughes | 1993 | Privacy as selective disclosure; transaction necessity |
| "The Cyphernomicon" | Timothy C. May | 1994 | 370-page FAQ; comprehensive philosophical reference |
| "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" | John Perry Barlow | 1996 | Maximalist position; architecture over law |
| "b-money" | Wei Dai | 1998 | Anonymous distributed electronic cash |
| "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" | Lawrence Lessig | 1999 | Code is law; architectural regulation |
| "Trusted Third Parties are Security Holes" | Nick Szabo | 2001 | Architectural principle for trust minimization |
| "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" | Satoshi Nakamoto | 2008 | Implementation of the cypherpunk program |
Full text-by-text mapping — each canonical work tied to the cryptographic primitive it authorizes and its place in the suite — is skills/privacy-architecture/references/lineage.md. Narrative exposition: skills/privacy-suite/SKILL.md §The Intellectual Lineage. Per-primitive epigraphs anchor each architecture reference (Chaum 1982 → blind signatures; GMR 1985 / May 1988 → ZKPs; Nakamoto 2008 §10 → Web3 privacy; Szabo 2001 → the TEE-as-minimized-TTP framing; Diffie–Hellman 1976 → everything).
Each skills/<name>/SKILL.md is a Claude Code skill (frontmatter name/description, references loaded on demand). Install by copying into ~/.claude/skills/ or registering the repo as a plugin; start with privacy-suite, which routes to the rest.
Not legal advice. The taxonomy is an engineering reference for schema design, disclosure drafting, and architecture decisions. Verify effective dates and pending rulemakings against primary sources before advising in a regulated context — the Currency Protocol tells you how stale any record is.
Hughes, 1993: "Cypherpunks write code." This repo is that code, with citations.