The detectors are the visible fifth of a surveillance program. The other four-fifths is the shell an examiner actually inspects. Here is the shell, with our own honest engineer-month estimates for a small team building it from scratch.
| Layer | What it has to do | Eng-months | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detection engine | Binary-native detectors with planted ground truth per pattern (19 today), relative thresholds, per-market baselines | 3–5 | the visible 20% |
| Maker-checker governance | Server-side four-eyes on dispositions, control changes, cluster splits, package releases; documentation quality gates | 2–3 | the first thing an examiner asks about |
| Write-once recordkeeping | Append-only evidence store, SHA-256 at write, chain-hashed package manifests, versioned re-scoping | 2–3 | Reg 1.31 posture |
| Entity resolution | Union-find over weighted identity links, confidence scoring, human confirm/split under four-eyes, operator-level limits | 2–4 | what makes limits real |
| Case management on the clock | 38.156 SLAs, triage SLAs, escalation chains, workflow definitions, bulk triage, keyboard speed | 2–3 | the daily surface |
| Ingestion that survives real data | Streamed 250MB uploads, gzip, FIX, dry-run validation, idempotent replay, quality warnings, drop-bucket pull, quotas, load-shed | 2–3 | where PoVs die |
| Filings and packages | Part 16/17, SAR drafts, Part 9/referral drafts, CCO inputs, Exhibit L, access reviews, retention attestations, examiner seats | 2–3 | the examiner's login |
| Operations you can attest to | Durable jobs, recurring schedules with catch-up, backups with encryption and restore drills, status page, smoke alarms, audit API, SSO with role mapping | 2–4 | the SOC 2 half |
Roughly 17–28 engineer-months before the first examination — by engineers who are, during designation, supposed to be building the matching engine. Every line above is live on DataTap today, and the whole thing is priced at a fraction of one of those engineers.
If surveillance is your product — if you are selling market integrity itself — build it, and we'll cheer. If surveillance is a condition of your license, buy the shell and spend your engineers on the market.