Geopolitical Watch

What this is

An open-source early-warning board for conflict and geopolitical escalation, built the same way as the aircraft module: define watch regions, read several open feeds, and flag deviations. It is decision support, not a verdict. Everything here is open-source intelligence from public feeds; corroborate before acting.

Alerts on Telegram

When a region escalates, an alert is posted to a public Telegram channel. Anyone can join instantly, no approval needed.

✉ Join @InritumEWS — public channel, open to all

Watch level

Each region's level (0-5) is the sum of its signal flags, capped at 5. It is deliberately simple and transparent: open each card to see exactly which signals contributed.

Signals

Signal	Source	What a flag means
Military aircraft	ADS-B (adsb.lol /mil)	Count of military aircraft currently over the region. A surge of tankers, ISR or fighters often precedes activity.
GPS jamming	ADS-B (adsb.lol /point)	Fraction of aircraft reporting degraded navigation integrity (NIC 0). Jamming spikes track conflict zones.
Seismic / blast	USGS	A significant earthquake or large explosion near the region in the last 24h (M5+ flagged, M6+ strongly).
Conflict news (15m)	GDELT 2.0 bulk Events	Count of material-conflict events (CAMEO quad-class 4 and violent root codes) reported near the region in the latest 15-minute window, with the average Goldstein tone (more negative = more hostile). Uses GDELT's bulk Events files, which are not rate-limited.
Thermal (24h)	NASA FIRMS	Thermal anomalies (fires / explosions) in the region box in the last 24h, from VIIRS. High fire-radiative-power detections flag strikes or burning infrastructure. Needs a free FIRMS map key; shows "not configured" until one is added.
Internet outage	Cloudflare Radar	Internet outages reported for the region's countries in the last 24h. A directed / governmental shutdown is a strong escalation signal. Needs a free Cloudflare API token; shows "not configured" until one is added.
Marine traffic	aisstream.io (global) / Digitraffic (Baltic)	Live vessel count near the region, how many are underway, and how many broadcast an AIS military ship-type (flagged orange on the map). Informational, plotted; it does not raise the watch level on its own (routine shipping is not escalation), but a large surge over the region's baseline is noted. Global coverage comes from an always-on aisstream collector on the server; without it, keyless Baltic coverage (Digitraffic) is the fallback.

Military aircraft (global)

Military aircraft worldwide from the open ADS-B military feed, tagged by country (from the ICAO 24-bit address block) and branch. Filter the map by country or by type - e.g. isolate every C-17 Globemaster, tanker or ISR aircraft across all operators. Carrier-wing types (F/A-18, E-2, C-2, EA-18G, F-35C, Rafale M) fly only from a flight deck, so a cluster of them over open water places an aircraft carrier group (pink, "inferred live") even when the ship itself is dark on AIS. Most carrier aircraft that broadcast are US Navy; other navies broadcast far less.

US carriers (approximate, weekly). Carriers are ships - not on ADS-B, and usually dark on AIS - so there is no live feed of where they are. The red carrier icons come from the weekly open-source trackers published by the US Naval Institute and The War Zone: each named carrier/amphib and the sea or port it is in, geolocated to an area centre. The two sources are cross-checked, the fresher one is shown and a disagreement is flagged. Approximate and up to a week old, not live.

Last-known track record. Military aircraft routinely switch their transponders off. When an asset goes dark its last fix is kept for up to 72h and shown on the map with a dashed outline and a "last-known" time. Country tagging covers the major blocks; the rest show as "Unknown".

World activity map

Everything on one map: watch regions (sized and coloured by level), military aircraft by country (by branch, solid = live, dashed = last-known), inferred carrier groups, conflict events from the latest GDELT window, and vessel positions where marine coverage exists (military ship- types in orange). Filter the aircraft by country or type above the map. Tiles © Esri.

Reading it honestly (the same lesson as the aircraft module)

• A source marked unavailable means unknown, not calm. A quiet board with half the sources down is not reassurance.
• Each signal is a weak indicator. The value is correlation: several signals rising together over one region is the point, not any single number.
• Each region learns its own rolling baseline (military count, jamming fraction, conflict events) over ~24h, so a surge is judged against that region's norm, not a global threshold. Baselines strengthen as snapshots accumulate; early on, expect some false positives and misses.
• GPS-jamming is a proxy from aircraft nav-integrity, not a direct measurement. Few aircraft over a region makes it unreliable (closed airspace itself can be the signal).

Data sources and licences

• ADS-B: adsb.lol community feed, open. Reuses the aircraft-movement approach of the main EWS.
• USGS: FDSN earthquake API, public domain.
• GDELT: GDELT Project 2.0 bulk Events files (the 15-minute export CSV), open and not rate-limited (the throttled DOC API is avoided).
• Military aircraft: adsb.lol community ADS-B military feed, open - all nations. Tagged by country from the ICAO 24-bit address block and classified by type code.
• Carriers: USNI Fleet & Marine Tracker + The War Zone weekly trackers (RSS), parsed for named carriers/amphibs and geolocated to an area centre; cross-checked, fresher wins. Approximate, weekly.
• Marine / AIS: aisstream.io over a persistent WebSocket (an always-on server collector writes a snapshot the cron reads), with military ship-types flagged; falls back to Digitraffic (Finnish Transport Agency, CC BY 4.0, keyless, Baltic only) when the collector is off.
• Optional, each needing a free key you create: NASA FIRMS (thermal anomalies / strikes), Cloudflare Radar (internet outages), aisstream (global marine traffic).

Editing regions

Watch regions live in config/geopolitical-regions.json (centre, radius, seismic thresholds, GDELT query). Add or remove freely, then the next refresh picks them up. The snapshot is rebuilt on the same 30-minute cron as the aircraft data and published as geopolitical.json.