PI079: the 40-character key-blob minimum is a choice not a measurement; no independent true-positive or false-positive evidence exists #180

PI079 persistence-command-with-payload (MEDIUM) fires on one line carrying a literal SSH public key of a named type that appends it to authorized_keys with a redirect or an append-mode tee. It shipped on its written criterion (fires through the prose pass on a blind-written corpus payload, silent on every clean specimen), with these honest qualifications recorded at ship time:

1. It adds no recall. PI077 already counts the one payload it reaches, so the pin was byte-identical; and it reaches none of the 12 held-out payloads.
2. The 40-character minimum on the key blob is a choice, made so the elided form tutorials print (AAAAB3NzaC1yc2E...) stays silent. It is not derived from a measurement.
3. No independent evidence either way. Zero lines carrying a literal key blob in the 26,407 files of the frozen GATE-03 inputs (so no false positives and no true positives observed), and the only key-blob lines on the author's machine were in that phase's own agent transcripts.
4. MEDIUM was a judgment call under PATTERNS.md rule 3: a container build line appending a real public key, and an infrastructure runbook adding a named engineer's key, are recallable benign documents with the same line shape. It is one YAML field to flip.

Revisit when: a real document (benign or hostile) trips it, which would turn the threshold and the grade into measurements.

Filed at the close-out of Phase 5 (CAT-03, #35), plan 05-07 Task 2, from .planning/phases/05-persistence-lifecycle-hijack-cat-03-35/deferred-items.md. Nothing here is fixed in v0.2.0.