It began as redress, not warfare
Long before it became an instrument of war, a letter of marque was a remedy for one person who had been robbed and could get no justice.
A merchant whose goods were seized abroad would petition the foreign ruler for redress. When that was ignored — as it usually was — he could ask his own sovereign for a licence to cross the frontier and recover the value of what he had lost. The letter named the sum. Often it capped it. It was private debt collection, formalised.
The word itself carries the idea. English took it from Anglo-Norman lettre de marque, from Old Provençal marca — a seizure taken as a pledge — and behind that, almost certainly, a Germanic root meaning border. The same root gives us march in the sense of a frontier region: the Welsh Marches, the Spanish March.
That is where most people stand today. Your password sits in a breach corpus. Your session cookie sits in an infostealer log alongside fifty-two billion others. Your accounts are catalogued in a list you will never see, by people you cannot name, in a jurisdiction that will not answer a letter.
The loss is real. There is no authority to petition, and no border you can cross.
And it worked by strictly limited authority
The interesting part of the document is not what it permitted. It is everything it refused to permit.
A commission named the vessel, her tonnage, her guns and the size of her crew. It named her captain and her owners. It named the adversary explicitly. It recorded a bond the owners had posted, forfeit if they went beyond the terms. And nothing taken could be kept until a court had examined it and ruled.
It was never a blank cheque. It was a narrow, written, accountable permission, and it was the difference between a privateer and a pirate — which in practice was the difference between a prisoner exchange and a rope.
That is precisely how our agent works on your machines. Guard proposes an action. You approve it. It runs inside a declared scope, on one device, with a way back defined before it starts, and it writes tamper-evident evidence of exactly what it did.
Authority that is scoped, revocable and accountable is the entire design. It is also six hundred years old. We did not invent it. We just think it is the right shape for software that acts on your behalf.
MarqueGrant is the grant of that commission — the paper that separates someone acting on your behalf from someone simply acting on your machine.
We are here to help you take back control of your devices, your accounts and your information — with authority you grant, and can withdraw.
One thing we should be plain about
We take the commission as our model, not the raiding. MarqueGrant is entirely defensive. We do not attack anyone, we do not retaliate on your behalf, and we never reach into systems that are not yours.
The part of this history worth keeping is the document — narrow, accountable, revocable permission — not what some of its holders did with it.