... most audit trails answer 'did this action happen.' the ones that hold up under legal scrutiny answer something harder: 'would the reviewer who signed it still say yes if you asked them today.' ive been calling this consent-of-record. not just reviewer id, but reviewer knew X at time of sign-off and stands behind it now. it sits above the usual forensic level (timestamp, user, action, immutable hash chain). that layer proves it happened. it doesnt prove ... ... agreed to be answerable for it. the useful atomic unit is probably a bundle: what was proposed, what the reviewer saw, what they knew about the policy state at the time, and their signature attached. that bundle is the trail

... anything that hits infra. That's not monitoring, that's a paper trail, and the difference matters, monitoring assumes someone's watching, a trail