Working paper v0.2-bds (26 May 2026) of Trust as Data Infrastructure: Local Verification, Portability, and Conservation in Digital Identity and AI Governance. This conceptual research article brings cryptographic trust infrastructure into critical data studies and infrastructure studies as an object of analysis rather than a neutral precondition. It develops a field vocabulary — locality, gauge invariance, and conservation — as diagnostics for public evidence infrastructures, and reads operational episodes usually framed as technical failures (X.509 path-construction failures, OCSP outages, trusted-list update gaps, root rotations, and the Estonian ROCA crisis) as moments that reveal democratic vulnerabilities in data governance. The convergence of eIDAS 2.0, the European Digital Identity Wallet, the AI Act, and post-quantum cryptography migration motivates the analysis. The argument is analytic, not metaphysical. Trust is not a physical substance; rather, contemporary trust systems exhibit three field-like infrastructural properties: locality (evidence must be verifiable at the point of use without dependence on a live issuer), gauge invariance (public meaning should survive substitutions of cryptographic primitive, verifier implementation, issuer, or jurisdiction), and conservation (attestable evidence must remain auditable after outages, organizational changes, root rotations, and technological migration). The field vocabulary offers a diagnostic framework for democratic data governance: it shifts attention from whether a credential, declaration, or AI output was once signed to whether the evidence remains locally inspectable, portable across institutional settings, and conserved for contestation. Companion artefacts in the trust-field bundle. Paper A (Trust Fields and Public Administration, Halduskultuur submission #421) applies the framework to administrative-culture studies. Paper B (Unified Postquantum Trust Field Theory) provides the theoretical / field-equation core. A shorter practitioner-essay variant of the present article (~2,400 words) was submitted to First Monday on 2026-05-25 as a companion to Paper B; the present 5,217-word version is the expanded research-article form, deposited here as a preprint for citation and visibility while the cascade of journal submissions runs. Status. Working paper — not peer-reviewed. Cascade-fallback packets prepared in parallel: JeDEM Reflections (~3,985 words), Information Polity (~5,000 words). The Big Data & Society research-article packet is the deposited canonical version. Tyche Institute is a research and education entity, not a trust-service provider or qualified trust-service provider. The article does not claim to provide eIDAS trust services, qualified certificates, conformity assessment, or legal compliance services. References to EATF, EUDI Wallet, eIDAS 2.0, and the AI Act are scholarly and analytic in scope.
Anton Sokolov (Tue,) studied this question.