Document Provenance & Verification

The Kingfish Project — kingfish.la · Effective date: July 21, 2026

How to read this page

Plain language: Every section starts with a short summary in everyday English. The summaries help you understand; the detailed text underneath is the official version.

Each section begins with a plain-language summary, written following the Federal Plain Language Guidelines. Summaries aid understanding; if a summary is ever inconsistent with the full text beneath it, the full text controls.

The short version

Plain language: We collect primary-source documents from official public sources, link back to each original, and stamp every one with a SHA-256 fingerprint you can check yourself. The official document is always the authority — our extracted text is a convenience, not a substitute.

The Kingfish Project publishes primary-source records — agendas, minutes, notices, packets, and similar documents — so readers can check our reporting against the originals. This page explains where those documents come from, how we fingerprint them, and how anyone can independently verify that a file has not been altered.

Where documents come from

Plain language: We take documents from official government and public sources, and every document page links straight back to the original.

We collect documents from official public sources — the websites and record systems of the public bodies we cover. Each document’s page on this site links to the official source (“Open official PDF”), so you can always retrieve the original yourself. We do not alter source documents.

The SHA-256 fingerprint

Plain language: Every document has a unique fingerprint. Change one character and the fingerprint changes completely — so it proves whether a file is exactly what we collected.

For every document we record a SHA-256 cryptographic hash — a 64-character fingerprint computed from the file’s exact contents. Any change to the file, however small, produces a completely different hash. We display the full SHA-256 on each document’s permanent page (at /documents/…), and the document’s URL itself is derived from that fingerprint. The hash lets you confirm that a copy you hold is bit-for-bit identical to the one we ingested.

The text we show

Plain language: The readable text on a document page is extracted from the original for convenience and search. The official PDF is the authority — check it if anything matters.

Where a document contains machine-readable text, we extract it verbatim and display it so the record is searchable and accessible. Extraction and OCR can introduce errors, and the layout of the original is not always preserved. The official document is authoritative. For anything that matters — a quote, a figure, a date — open the source PDF linked on the page and rely on it, not on the extracted text.

How to verify a document yourself

Plain language: Download the file, run one command to compute its SHA-256, and compare it to the fingerprint on our page. If they match, the file is exactly what we collected.

1. Download the document (from our page or from the official source).
2. Compute its SHA-256:
   • macOS / Linux: shasum -a 256 <file>
   • Windows (PowerShell): Get-FileHash <file> -Algorithm SHA256
3. Compare the result to the SHA-256 shown on the document’s page.

If the two hashes match, the file is identical to the one we ingested. If they differ, the file has been changed — re-download from the official source and check again.

Corrections, replacements, and versions

Plain language: If a source changes or pulls a document, that’s a new file with a new fingerprint. We treat it as a new version rather than quietly overwriting the record.

Because the fingerprint is derived from the file’s contents, a revised or replaced document is a different file with a different SHA-256. When a source publishes a new version, we record it as a distinct document rather than silently overwriting the original, so the history of what was published — and when — is preserved. If we correct an error in our own extracted text or metadata, the underlying source file and its fingerprint are unaffected.

What we retain

Plain language: We keep the records we collect so they remain available even if a public body later removes them — a durable public archive is part of the point.

We retain the documents we collect as a public-interest archive, so records stay available to readers and researchers even if the original is later moved or taken down. The official source remains the authority; our copy and its fingerprint exist so the record — and any change to it — can always be checked.

Questions

Email editor@kingfish.la with any question about a document’s provenance or a verification that doesn’t match.