List recent roll-call votes for a U.S. federal jurisdiction (Congress.gov).
AI agents call recent_votes to retrieve information from Civic Awareness without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
This tool retrieves historical voting data from Congress.gov, a public government data source. It has no side effects, cannot modify data, execute code, delete information, or move funds. The worst-case misuse would be extracting voting records to identify patterns, which poses minimal risk. Classification as Read is appropriate for a passive query of public legislative data.
From the tool's definition Tool name 'recent_votes' and description 'List recent roll-call votes' indicate retrieval of public legislative voting records with no modification or execution of external operations. The verb 'List' confirms a query-only operation.
Attacks that exploit this kind of access
List recent roll-call votes for a U.S. federal jurisdiction (Congress.gov). It is categorised as a Read tool in the Civic Awareness MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the Civic Awareness MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for recent_votes: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Civic Awareness. Nothing to install.
recent_votes is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the recent_votes rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for recent_votes. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
recent_votes is provided by the Civic Awareness MCP server (julianken/civic-awareness-mcp). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Every MCP server has a record like this.
Type a name, get the same breakdown: verified identity, auth posture, risk grade, capabilities, recommended policy.
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