How SENTINEL collects, verifies, and presents data

All data SENTINEL renders comes from public, open-source feeds. Categories include:

• Aviation. ADS-B flight tracking from community feeders and licensed aggregators. Aircraft type, callsign, operator, and squawk codes are cross-referenced across two sources to fill gaps where one feed lacks coverage.
• Maritime. AIS vessel positions from public AIS streams, supplemented by USNI Fleet Tracker for US Navy carrier and amphibious group positions, and OpenSanctions for OFAC-listed dark-fleet vessels.
• Conflict and patterns. NASA FIRMS thermal anomalies, GDELT global event data, the United States Geological Survey for seismicity, GDACS for natural hazards, and curated X / Telegram channels for press-speed signal.
• Country dossiers. Wikidata, the CIA World Factbook, the World Bank, the IMF, the Global Firepower Index, parliamentary Wikipedia pages, and the United Nations specialized agency rolls. Government, military, parliament, foreign relations, and economy panels are populated from these sources on cron-driven refresh schedules.
• Cyber and spectrum. Cloudflare Radar for BGP route leaks and origin hijacks, OONI for per-country censorship measurement, MISP galaxy taxonomy for threat-actor attribution, and live GPS jamming and spoofing detection from ADS-B-derived position residuals.
• Weather and hazards. NOAA / National Weather Service CAP feeds, the National Hurricane Center, Joint Typhoon Warning Center, Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers, USGS earthquakes, and Pacific and Indian Ocean tsunami warning systems.
• Editorial. Wikipedia Portal:Current_events for the day-by-day ledger, plus official press releases from the United Nations, US Department of Defense, NATO, OPEC, BRICS, and G7 / G20.
• Launches. The Space Devs Launch Library 2 for upcoming and recent rocket launches, with FAA NOTAM cross-references where available.

The full machine-readable source list, refresh cadence per provider, response envelope format, public API rate limits, and known limitations are documented at /docs and refreshed whenever a feed is added or retired. See in particular raw vs inferred, confidence semantics, and freshness and retention for the technical detail behind the editorial standards on this page.

Automated. Almost everything on the live globe is automated end to end. Cron sweeps refresh the country-data caches on daily and weekly cadences, signal pollers ingest X and Telegram on eight-minute cycles, ADS-B streams reconcile into the live aircraft layer continuously, and FIRMS thermal anomalies are filtered through a routine-flare classifier and a strategic-priority weighting before being surfaced. Pattern detection on aircraft tracks (loiters, drops, cargo arrivals at airfields) is rule-based and runs on the same cadence as the underlying feed.

Curated. A short list of fields is set or overridden by hand. Country histories were generated once and reviewed for accuracy. Country dossier overrides at certain assets (refinery names, broadcaster catalog, parliament chamber identification) are recorded in version-controlled JSON when an automated source returns a wrong or incomplete value. Curated entries are tagged in the underlying data and visible in the dossier UI.

Hybrid. The daily situation report is generated from the previous twenty-four hours of signals, patterns, and editorial events using an AI summarizer with a fixed analytical voice; the prompt is constrained to the underlying signal payload and forbidden from speculating beyond it. Country briefs follow the same constraint. Both surfaces are rebuilt on cron rather than on user request, so any given page state is reproducible from the underlying caches.

SENTINEL uses large-language-model assistance in three places: the daily situation report on /today, the per-country brief preview on each country dossier, and the back-end research synthesis behind the country histories. In every case the model is given only public-source material as input and is constrained to a fixed analytical register that prohibits speculation beyond the source signal.

AI is not used to invent events, attribute strikes, or assign casualty figures. It is used to compress and rephrase. The same dataset rendered by hand would carry the same conclusions; the model accelerates the editorial pass that turns it into prose.

AI is also used during engineering work on SENTINEL itself, including code review, refactoring, and documentation drafting. That use is entirely back-end and does not affect any data shown to visitors.

Every data point on the globe links back to its origin where the source publishes a stable URL. Aircraft cards link to the FlightRadar24 or ADS-B Exchange tracking page; ship cards link to MarineTraffic; signals link to the original X or Telegram post; news cards link to the publishing outlet; pattern detections expose the underlying detection rule and the live data points it fired on.

Country dossiers display a Sources section at the bottom of the Overview tab where any panel data has a citable upstream record. Wikidata and Wikipedia entities are linked by their canonical identifier. Where multiple sources disagree, SENTINEL shows the higher-trust source (typically a government feed or peer-reviewed dataset) and notes the discrepancy in the panel where space allows.

Errors are corrected without flagging them in-text. The underlying data file or override is updated; the next refresh propagates the fix everywhere it is rendered. Material errors that affect a published daily brief are corrected in place and noted in the in-site changelog at the bottom of the live globe's legend popover.

If you spot an error, a misidentified asset, or a stale source, email [email protected] with a link to the source you believe is more authoritative. Corrections are reviewed and applied within seventy-two hours where the upstream evidence supports them.

SENTINEL is an independent project. There is no editorial board, no investor influencing coverage, and no advertiser relationship that affects what appears on the globe or in the editorial pages. Pro subscriptions and ad revenue from the magazine pages fund operations; neither buys editorial preference.

The site does not accept paid placement, paid country dossier improvements, or paid pattern suppression. If a source feed is dropped or de-emphasized it is for technical or reliability reasons, never commercial.

How SENTINEL handles visitor data, including analytics and consent, is detailed on the privacy page.