“A signature is not consent if the document is incomprehensible. ” This preprint gives you a working audit standard for the most common governance failure of the AI age: institutions claiming “transparency” while building systems no one can actually see. The Emergency Opacity Trap reframes opacity as a measurable form of structural coercion and introduces the Information Coercion Index (ICI) plus IAS-INFO (GO/CONDITIONAL/BLOCK) to evaluate whether disclosure is practically accessible, timely, and verifiable. If you cannot compute ICI due to access barriers, the framework treats observability as closed—because “formal availability” is not the same as real observability. Can affected parties consent to what they cannot see? This paper applies Zero Leap Theory (ZLT) to information governance and shows that opacity is not a communication flaw but a structural gate closure: when observability approaches zero, meaningful consent becomes impossible even under valid legal permissions. We introduce the Emergency Opacity Trap—sustained reductions in practical observability justified by emergency logic and maintained through classification expansion, algorithmic opacity, corporate secrecy, or bureaucratic complexity. We define the Information Coercion Index (ICI) to quantify coercion-by-opacity and integrate it into ZLT via the O→C Dependency Theorem, formalizing effective consent as Ceff=Clegal⋅OviableC₄₅₅ = C₋₄₆₀₋ Oₕ₈₀₁₋₄Ceff=Clegal⋅Oviable with Oviable= (1+ICI) −1Oₕ₈₀₁₋₄= (1+ICI) ^-1Oviable= (1+ICI) −1. Case studies across classification regimes, corporate data practices, algorithmic decision systems, and complexity-based governance illustrate diagnostic signatures. We provide IAS-INFO, an operational audit standard with measurable proxies, thresholds, and an anti-gaming Opacity-Washing Rule: transparency claims that evaluate only formal disclosure without practical accessibility are invalid.
DANNY YUBI DAGOGLIANO (Thu,) studied this question.