Escalation Licensing¶
A single weak signal is weak. A weak signal next to a confirming one is a story. Escalation licensing lets a rule say "raise me a notch if one of these other rules also fired" - and nothing more.
Where it comes from¶
Borrowed from T-cell help. A B cell that has bound an antigen still needs a licensed signal from a helper T cell before it commits to a full response. Help focuses and amplifies the response. It does not create it: the B cell already bound the antigen, and natural killer cells still destroy cells that never presented one.
The autoimmune reading is the failure mode: treating help as authorization. A signal that only says "this is real" must never be what makes a finding fire in the first place.
The one rule¶
A licensor only ever moves a finding up one notch:
Never to FATAL. Never more than one notch, even if several licensors fire. And if no licensor fires, the finding simply stands at its own severity - the bump is lost, the finding is not. Evading the licensor can cost you the escalation; it can never make the detection disappear.
The escalation is transparent: an escalated finding records which rules licensed it.
Star, not chain¶
Licensing is a star, not a ladder. A rule that is itself raised by another rule cannot in turn raise a third. That keeps a single weak signal from cascading an entire run upward through a chain of "and therefore".
Missing help is also a signal¶
The mirror image matters too. If a finding fired whose rule expects a licensor and none came, that is not evidence about the package - it is a tool-health observation: a detector that usually travels with a partner travelled alone. It is reported to the calibration output (like the other M-series tool-health entries), weight 0, and never scored.
That is the design law in one line: licensing amplifies, never authorizes; help is a signal, and missing help is also a signal.