ShadowBroker: The Open-Source OSINT Dashboard That Tracks Everything

By Prahlad Menon 4 min read

What if you could track billionaire jets, spy satellites, naval carrier groups, and GPS jamming zones — all from a single dashboard running on your laptop?

That’s exactly what ShadowBroker does. And yes, it looks like something out of a Hollywood hacker movie. But underneath the aesthetic is a serious OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) platform that aggregates real-time data from over 15 public feeds.

The Problem It Solves

Anyone following geopolitical events knows the pain: bouncing between FlightRadar24 for aircraft, MarineTraffic for ships, Twitter/X for breaking news, and various earthquake/satellite trackers. The creator (@vancecookcobxin on GitHub) got tired of this fragmentation and built a unified view.

ShadowBroker pulls everything into a single MapLibre GL instance:

  • 5,000+ aircraft via OpenSky Network (commercial, private, military)
  • 25,000+ ships via AIS WebSocket streams
  • 2,000+ satellites with orbital tracking via CelesTrak
  • Conflict events from GDELT
  • Ukraine frontline from DeepState Map
  • Earthquakes from USGS
  • 2,000+ CCTV cameras (London, NYC, Austin, Singapore)
  • GPS jamming zones calculated in real-time
  • NASA fire hotspots from VIIRS satellite data
  • 500+ public SDR receivers worldwide

And it’s all running locally via Docker with a single command.

The Coolest Features

GPS Jamming Detection — This is the standout. ShadowBroker analyzes navigation accuracy data (NAC-P values) from commercial aircraft overhead and aggregates it into grid cells. When aircraft report degraded navigation, the system identifies interference zones and renders red “GPS JAM” overlays with severity percentages. You’re literally watching electronic warfare happen in real-time.

Carrier Strike Group Tracker — All 11 active US Navy aircraft carriers are tracked using automated GDELT news scraping to estimate their positions. The system has 50+ geographic region-to-coordinate mappings built in.

Private Jet Tracking — Beyond just aircraft positions, it identifies owner information for high-net-worth individual aircraft. Yes, you can track the jets of billionaires.

Satellite Intel Cards — Right-click anywhere on the map and get a floating card showing the latest Sentinel-2 satellite photo with capture date, cloud cover percentage, and a link to full-resolution imagery (10m resolution, updated every ~5 days).

Live SDR Tuner — Click any of the 500+ KiwiSDR nodes worldwide to open an embedded software-defined radio tuner directly in the dashboard. Monitor shortwave, ham radio, and other signals.

The Technical Reality

Getting 30,000+ moving GeoJSON features on a map without crashing a browser isn’t trivial. The developer documented the optimization journey:

  • Aggressive viewport culling (don’t render what’s not visible)
  • Debounced state updates
  • 90% compression on FastAPI payloads
  • Clustered display with count labels that decluster on zoom

The stack is Next.js for the frontend, FastAPI/Python for the backend, and MapLibre GL for rendering. It runs on modest hardware — the creator develops on an i5 with an RTX 3050.

Running It

git clone https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker.git
cd Shadowbroker
./compose.sh up -d

Open http://localhost:3000 and you’re in. Most data sources require no API keys. A few (like AIS vessel data from aisstream.io and Singapore traffic cams) need free API keys.

Who Is This For?

  • OSINT researchers tracking global events
  • Journalists investigating conflicts, flights, or shipping
  • Security analysts monitoring infrastructure
  • Hobbyists who want a command-center view of the world
  • Anyone curious about what’s actually happening on the planet right now

The Bigger Picture

What makes ShadowBroker notable isn’t just the feature list — it’s the democratization of intelligence. All of this data has been public for years, scattered across dozens of services. Aggregating it into a usable interface that anyone can run locally shifts the power dynamic.

You don’t need a government agency or a Bloomberg terminal to get a real-time picture of global activity. You need Docker and curiosity.

GitHub: BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker

This project hit Hacker News this week and earned 300+ points. Given how polished the implementation is, it’s likely to see rapid community development.