What this page covers
How the tracker collects, classifies, and publishes alerts, and where the limits are. The short version: official sources first, automation with narrow AI use, and honesty when our coverage is not good enough to support a claim.
Sources, not stories
The tracker monitors official government channels: defence ministries, interior ministries, civil defence and civil aviation authorities, armed forces, and state wire services. Media is included deliberately at a lower tier, because decision-makers need to see how stories surface and spread, but media alone can never drive the highest urgency level.
Every source is verified by fetching it before it is added to the registry, and the verification date is recorded. A fabricated or dead handle returns nothing forever and silently inflates coverage, which is worse than an honest gap.
The host-government model
The primary source for any country is that country's own government speaking to its own people. Foreign-government assessments, such as embassy alerts, and international feeds are kept and clearly labelled, but they are the fallback, not the foundation. A country with an interior ministry, a defence ministry, and civil protection publishing daily should never be scored off another government's view of it.
Source tiers
Tier 1 — official government channels. Tier 2 — state news agencies, international wire services, and humanitarian bodies. Tier 3 — international media, automatically capped at MONITOR urgency so sensationalism cannot drive an IMMEDIATE alert.
A tier label describes the authority of a source, never the accuracy of its content. Some official channels are state-controlled and substantively propaganda; those are labelled so a reader can weigh them. Ceremonial output from a defence ministry is genuinely the government speaking and also low operational signal. Both things can be true, and the interface does not pretend otherwise.
Automation and AI
Automation runs the pipeline and AI does part of the work. It searches the monitored sources for newly published material, pulls what it finds into a fixed structure, translates content that is not in English, and assigns each item to a country. Translation covers Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu. Translated items carry a [Translated] tag.
AI is not allowed to form a view. It does not assess what an event means, predict what comes next, score a country, or write an opinion. Extraction runs as a parser. An item may carry only facts stated in the source text, it must name the source that stated them, and an item with no named source is discarded rather than guessed at. Editorial language is stripped, so words like crisis and alarming never reach an alert.
Urgency is graded against written criteria, set out below. The model applies those criteria to the item, and that is the whole of its role here. It forms no view about how dangerous something is. Deterministic rules then sit downstream where the model cannot reach them: international media can never produce an IMMEDIATE alert, a restriction in place for hours without change is capped at MONITOR, and an item that stops matching the patterns is dropped back. Direct feeds skip the model and are graded by pattern alone.
Every item traces to an official source you can open yourself. No person reviews an item before it reaches you, so every classification is machine-assigned and we do not warrant it. Where an item links to an original, that original governs.
Urgency levels
IMMEDIATE — active, high-impact events requiring immediate awareness or action. MONITOR — developing situations warranting continued attention. BACKGROUND — standing information with no immediate action required.
The calm streak, and when we refuse to show it
The calm streak counts days since the last recorded hostile incident in a country. It has a failure mode that runs in the dangerous direction: a dead feed and a peaceful country look identical, because nothing arrives either way. Unchecked, an ingestion outage would push the number up, toward "safe".
So the streak is gated on source health. If no monitored source for a country is reporting, the number is withheld and replaced with a plain statement that official reporting is insufficient. If nothing has been received from a country's sources for 48 hours, the number is withheld. If fewer than half its sources are reporting, the streak is shown but flagged as degraded. A source we have no health record for counts as silent, because unknown must never read as fine on a safety metric.
Withholding is the right default. "We cannot tell you" is recoverable. "It has been quiet for 60 days" when the feed died on day one is not.
What the tracker is not
It is not a warning system, and it is not security, legal, medical, or travel advice. The absence of an alert is not evidence of safety: events can occur before any official statement, and feeds can fail. Verify with official sources and take advice from your own security professionals before acting. The Terms of Service at /terms set out the full position.