How the tactic taxonomy was developed

SovGuardAI evaluates documents against a structured taxonomy of sovereign citizen tactics. The taxonomy is the substantive part of the system, and it is not derived from the software. It implements a body of published, peer-reviewed research on sovereign citizen ideology, listed below, together with primary court filings and opinions, government and non-governmental threat assessments, and the wider peer-reviewed literature.

Each entry in the taxonomy names a tactic, defines it, and records where the pattern has been documented. Tactics are written from filings and opinions rather than from summaries, which is why the definitions describe what appears on a page rather than what a movement believes. Where a tactic has been addressed by a court, the decision is bound to it in a separate citation library whose quotations are checked against the primary source on every build.

The taxonomy is versioned and changes deliberately. Any edit that could move detection or scoring is re-run against a suite of known documents before it is deployed, and the expected result for each document is recorded in that suite as a visible change rather than adjusted to fit a new outcome.

Selected publications

• Sarteschi, C. M. (2020). Sovereign Citizens: A Psychological and Criminological Analysis. In V. B. Van Hasselt (Ed.), SpringerBriefs in Behavioral Criminology. Springer International Publishing.
• Sarteschi, C. M. (2020). Sovereign citizens: A narrative review with implications of violence towards law enforcement. Aggression and Violent Behavior.
• Sarteschi, C. M. (2025). American State Nationals: The next iteration of the sovereign citizen movement. In H. Hobbs, S. Young, & J. McIntyre (Eds.), Pseudolaw and Sovereign Citizens. Hart Publishing.
• Sarteschi, C. M. (2023). Sovereign citizens and QAnon: The increasing overlaps with a focus on Child Protective Service (CPS) cases. International Journal of Coercion, Abuse and Manipulation.
• Sarteschi, C. M. (2026). Sovereign Citizen Ideology: Spotlight on the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Emerald Publishing Limited.

SovGuardAI, takes whatever document you upload and compares it to court-recognized, court-named sovereign citizen behaviors, ideology, language, etc. It will point out the similarities, and alert you by page numbers and paragraph numbers, whenever possible. Scan quality is one of several limits on what SovGuardAI can extract: native text PDFs give the most reliable results, and heavily scanned or handwritten filings may limit phrase extraction where key language appears in degraded form.

It will point out detected sovereign citizen tactics. It will go beyond that, and show you how those specific tactics have been previously ruled on in the courts. It will state the actual court rulings, with citations, that have rejected those identified sovereign citizen arguments. SovGuardAI, will give you a complete multi-page report. It will also provide an overview. A summary of the pertinent details. We call this: The 60-second brief. SovGuardAI does the time-consuming, labor-intensive research. You assess it and write your academic paper, court ruling or legal brief.

People who act in the capacity of sovereign citizens, are extremely litigious. One of their submitted documents could easily be 100 to 200 pages in length and sometimes more. This takes an immense amount of time to read and analyze. How long does it take you to carefully read 100 to 200 pages? It is not only the amount of time, it's also the tedious, lengthy work which SovGuardAI now makes unnecessary.

If you are an attorney, SovGuardAI will become the sovereign citizen expert, valued, member of your firm.

If you are a college or law school professor, SovGuardAI will save class time by showing your students, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, known sovereign citizen language, ideology, tactics, etc. You will not need to take up valuable class time breaking down and analyzing sovereign citizen documents.

If you are new to the world of sovereign citizens, their behaviors, their tactics, their known criminal behavior, etc., familiarize yourself with SovGuardAI.

Judges, attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, researchers, professors, students, reporters, and all interested individuals, can and should take advantage of the availability of SovGuardAI.