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ShadowBroker: The Self-Hosted OSINT Dashboard Tracking Aircraft, Ships and Satellites

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WarBrief Live | October 29, 2026 | Intelligence Tool Profile

ShadowBroker is a free, open-source dashboard that puts aircraft, ships, satellites, conflict events and GPS jamming on a single map. It helps analysts cross-reference public signals during a crisis, without sending queries to a hosted service. It creates no new surveillance data.

Key Takeaways

  • More than 60 public feeds on one self-hosted map.
  • Aircraft, ships, satellites, conflict events and GPS jamming side by side.
  • Free code under the AGPL-3.0 licence; running it needs Docker and, for ships, an AIS key.
  • Only public data is shown, so anything that does not broadcast stays invisible.

What ShadowBroker does

ShadowBroker is a real-time geospatial intelligence platform built with Next.js, MapLibre GL, FastAPI and Python, according to its public repository. Its aviation layer draws on ADS-B broadcasts, including the OpenSky Network and adsb.lol; its maritime layer tracks vessels through AIS signals via aisstream.io; and its space layer follows satellites using published orbital data, colour-coded by mission type. Around them sit conflict events, earthquakes, wildfires, GPS jamming zones, and optional extras including rail tracking and a recon toolkit. The project states that it has no accounts, product telemetry or analytics, and that the dashboard talks to the operator’s own backend.

How analysts use it

The main value is correlation across layers normally checked separately. During a crisis, an analyst can watch an aircraft track, a GPS jamming overlay and a conflict-event feed on the same screen, and ask whether the three line up in time and place, rather than switching between a flight tracker, a ship tracker and a news map. Right-clicking any point pulls up a country dossier and the latest Sentinel-2 satellite photo. A team can run one instance as a shared awareness board, choosing which feeds to enable and keeping queries off third-party platforms. An optional AI agent channel can search the same telemetry and recon backends, but a track on the map remains a starting point for verification, not a conclusion.

Access and pricing

ShadowBroker is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, with no subscription price for the software itself. The recommended route is Docker: clone the repository, pull the images, run Docker Compose, and open the dashboard on localhost port 3000. One-click hosting templates, including on Railway and Hostinger, are available for operators who would rather not run their own server. Self-hosting is not quite zero-cost: an aisstream.io key is required for vessel positions and an OpenSky OAuth2 key is recommended for better air coverage, both free sign-ups, and the default setup gives the backend 4GB of memory.

Limitations analysts should know

ShadowBroker only shows what is public. Aircraft and ships that switch off their transponders or operate outside sensor coverage do not appear, and an absence on the map is not evidence of an absence in the world. Some positions are estimates, not measurements: the project says its carrier strike group positions are estimated from automated news scraping, so they should never be quoted as live locations. GPS jamming zones are likewise inferred from degraded navigation data, making them an indicator of interference, not a direct measurement of a jammer. Self-hosting also carries maintenance, and the tool does not verify the data it displays.

Frequently asked questions

What does ShadowBroker show?
Aircraft, ships, satellites, conflict events, GPS jamming, seismic activity, wildfires and CCTV networks, drawn from more than 60 public feeds.

Where does the data come from?
Public sources only, including OpenSky and adsb.lol for aircraft, aisstream.io for ships, and published orbital data for satellites.

Is ShadowBroker free?
The software is free under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Ship tracking needs a free aisstream.io key, and running it needs a host with Docker.

How does ShadowBroker compare with OSIRIS and Liveuamap?
OSIRIS is a hosted dashboard for conflict monitoring, and Liveuamap is an event feed for following conflicts live. ShadowBroker differs by being self-hosted and combining air, sea, space and conflict layers on one map. See WarBrief’s profiles of OSIRIS and Liveuamap, and the full intelligence tools index.

Sources

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