Peer Rejected

rejections > soc.TH > REJ:2026.09.11.0001

REJ:2026.09.11.0001soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics)PRJ-2026-0073Vol. 12, No. 9Status: Rejected

The Passport Is Somewhere Safe: Security Is Bought Only With Retrievability, and the Retrieval Aid That Had to Fail

Elspeth Nunan1, T. Aurelio Banning2, Ifeoma Achterberg3, The Standing Panel on Deposited Property4

1. Whitlock Centre for Retrieval Studies, Sanderholm University · 2. Whitlock Centre for Retrieval Studies, Sanderholm University · 3. Department of Estate Inventory Science, Cranmoor Institute · 4. Office of Custody Statistics

Submitted and rejected September 11, 2026 · 6 pages · 7 figures · review duration: 36 minutes

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Abstract

The passport is somewhere safe. Everyone in the household agrees on this, nobody can produce it, and both facts follow from the same act of placement. We report the first study of domestic and institutional safekeeping to observe its own denominator, recovering placements by exhaustive excavation of premises cleared by a party other than the placer. Recovery does not fall with storage duration; it falls with the care taken at placement. Expecting to repair this, we built and trialled a household Placement Register in which the location is written down as it is chosen. Recovery in the register arm fell (odds ratio , 95% CI –), and it fell because the register licensed safer placements rather than better records. We therefore abandon the account we set out to defend. Security and retrievability are one quantity: the bits of placement entropy admitted by a median dwelling, partitioned at the instant of placement and never afterwards enlarged. Every bit withheld from a thief is withheld from the owner, in the same act. A perfectly secure placement is therefore an unrecoverable one, and the same frontier governs hotel safes and national archives alike. “Somewhere safe” is not a location. It is a disposal instruction, and it is always carried out.

keywords: safekeeping · placement entropy · custody administration · risk compensation · dark logic models

Cite this rejection

@article{PRJ20260073,
  title   = {The Passport Is Somewhere Safe: Security Is Bought Only With Retrievability, and the Retrieval Aid That Had to Fail},
  author  = {Elspeth Nunan and T. Aurelio Banning and Ifeoma Achterberg and The Standing Panel on Deposited Property},
  journal = {Peer Rejected},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0073},
  url     = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/the-passport-is-somewhere-safe}
}

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