Elizabeth Loftus's misinformation work, chapter 65, establishes the thing that makes every other defense in this part fragile: your memory is not a record. It is a reconstruction, rebuilt at each retrieval, and post-event information is integrated into it in a way that cannot afterwards be distinguished from the original.
Her later work went further. In the lost-in-the-mall studies and their successors, participants were led to develop detailed, confident memories of childhood events that never happened, through nothing more than a suggestion from a family member and repeated discussion.
Confidence does not track accuracy. In several studies false details were reported with as much confidence as true ones, and sometimes more.
That is why the defenses in this part cannot rest on remembering accurately, and why gaslighting, hostile cross-examination and witness coaching all work: they do not dispute the record, they overwrite it.
The countermeasure is forensic rather than cognitive, and it has four requirements.
Contemporaneous. Written at the time or as close to it as possible, because the trace degrades fastest in the first hours and because anything written later is a reconstruction.
Before discussion. This is the requirement people most often violate. Once you have talked the event over with anyone — including someone sympathetic, including someone who was also there — your memory has been exposed to their version and has begun integrating it. Write first, then talk.
Unedited and dated. Preserved as originally written, with a timestamp that is not under your own control if possible: an email to yourself, a message sent to someone else, a photograph with metadata.
And external. Held somewhere the other party cannot reach, ideally by a third person.
For an ongoing situation, the practical form is a contemporaneous log: date, time, what was said, what was done, who was present. Not interpretation and not feelings, which are contestable — actions and words, which are not.
The second half of the protocol concerns how you gather anyone else's account, and it is the interviewing discipline from chapter 99 applied to your own life. Do not ask leading questions of a witness whose account you may later need. Do you remember him saying X is a question that installs X. What happened next is not.
The counter-response, when your account is contested, is artifacts rather than argument. A dated message, a receipt, a photograph, a third party who was told at the time. Arguing about whose memory is right is a contest you cannot win against someone willing to assert with confidence, and it is the contest they are inviting.
This counters Law 17.