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Sources & licensing

Argus republishes other people’s data, so which sources those are and under what terms is part of the product, not an appendix. Every source below is fetched by an adapter in this repository; the licence text is the same string the pipeline writes into each run’s manifest, held identical by a test. Sources we cannot lawfully redistribute are listed too, with the reason — the discipline is only worth anything if the exclusions are visible.

Geopolitical sources

These drive theater likelihood. Each event is placed in a theater and cites its own source URL; see the methodology for how they are weighted.

Source	Contributes	Coverage	Cadence	Typical lag	Licence
Taiwan MND daily PLA activity reports Ministry of National Defense, Republic of China (Taiwan) `tw-mnd`	`adiz-incursion`	Taiwan Strait only	Daily	Same day	ROC government publication (primary source). Backfill compilations (ChinaPower/PLATracker) have their own terms -- verify before redistributing their rows commercially.
OFAC SDN designations (delta) U.S. Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control `ofac-sdn`	`sanctions-action`	Routed by sanctions program to the theaters it bears on	Daily (snapshot diffed against the previous run)	Same day	US government work: public domain. No redistribution friction.
Federal Register — BIS export-control rules U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (via the Federal Register API) `federal-register-bis`	`export-control-action`	BIS rules amending the Export Administration Regulations (Entity List, licence policy, control-list changes); routed by the destination countries the rule names, one event per theater	Daily (rolling 45-day window of published rules; re-fetches dedupe by content address)	Same day as Federal Register publication	US government work: public domain. Federal Register / BIS rule text, no redistribution friction.
NGA Maritime Safety Information — navigational warnings U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Maritime Safety Information) `nga-msi`	`missile-activity` `military-exercise` `gps-interference` `attack-on-shipping`	In-force NAVAREA IV / XII and HYDROPAC / HYDROLANT / HYDROARC warnings, security categories only (missile and gunnery areas, naval and hazardous operations, GPS interference, mines, piracy); navigation-safety warnings are dropped and counted; placed by the message's own coordinates into the theater polygons	Continuous broadcast; read daily (the in-force set, deduped by warning number)	Same day as broadcast	US government work (NGA): public domain. Warnings as broadcast; positions are the message's own.
UCDP georeferenced conflict events Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Uppsala University `ucdp`	`armed-clash`	Global — the largest contributor by volume	Monthly candidate release, re-read daily	42–120 days (median ~81)	CC BY 4.0 — commercial reuse permitted with attribution. Cite: Davies, Pettersson & Öberg (2026) Journal of Peace Research; Sundberg & Melander (2013) Introducing the UCDP GED. UCDP is funded by DEMSCORE (Swedish Research Council grant 2021-00162).
UK NCSC advisories & news (state-attributed) UK National Cyber Security Centre `ncsc`	`cyber-operation`	Routed by attributed state actor to the theaters it threatens	Daily	Same day	UK Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0 — display 'Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0' wherever these events surface. Events only — no indicators/IOCs.
FBI IC3 industry alerts & PSAs (state-attributed) FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center `ic3`	`cyber-operation`	Routed by attributed state actor to the theaters it threatens	Daily	Same day	US government work: public domain. Events only — no indicators/IOCs.
GDELT 2.0 raw event export The GDELT Project `gdelt`	`armed-clash` `protest-unrest` `military-exercise` `diplomatic-incident` `economic-coercion`	All nine monitored theaters — the low-latency backbone for eight of them	Every 15 minutes upstream; a full 24h window is read daily	~15 minutes	Free with attribution; cite the underlying article URL (SOURCEURL).

All-hazards sources

These are point-and-radius phenomena matched to assets by proximity rather than by theater, so they never contribute to a theater’s geopolitical likelihood. A site is scored by the strongest hazard active on it now — repeated reports of one storm count once, a serious hazard of a different kind adds one level, and a hazard that has ended leaves a low “after the event” row for a week. The rule and its provisional cut-offs are on the methodology page, under Likelihood.

Source	Contributes	Coverage	Cadence	Typical lag	Licence
USGS earthquakes (M4.5+, past day) U.S. Geological Survey `usgs`	`earthquake`	Global — matched to assets by proximity, not theater	Daily	Minutes	US government work: public domain.
GDACS multi-hazard alerts (Orange/Red) Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (UN/EC) `gdacs`	`earthquake` `tropical-cyclone` `flood` `volcanic` `wildfire`	Global — matched to assets by proximity, not theater	Daily	Hours	GDACS (UN/EC): free to use with attribution.
NOAA/NHC active tropical cyclones NOAA National Hurricane Center `nhc`	`tropical-cyclone`	Atlantic & eastern Pacific basins — matched by proximity	Daily	Hours (6-hourly advisories)	US government work (NOAA/NWS): public domain.
NWS severe-weather & flood alerts (Severe/Extreme) NOAA National Weather Service `nws`	`severe-weather` `flood`	United States — matched by proximity	Daily	Minutes	US government work (NOAA/NWS): public domain.

Condition layers

Government travel advisories are conditions, not incidents: a per-country level each government sets for its own nationals. They are shown beside the acute score and never summed into a theater’s likelihood; only a level change would ever be a feed event.

Source	Contributes	Coverage	Cadence	Typical lag	Licence
US Department of State travel advisories U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs `us-state`	Per-country advisory level 1–4 + risk indicators (condition layer; not feed events)	~210 countries	Irregular; read daily	Same day	U.S. Department of State travel advisory (U.S. government work, public domain).
UK FCDO foreign travel advice UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (gov.uk content API) `uk-fcdo`	Per-country advice status, normalised onto the 1–4 scale (condition layer; not feed events)	~225 countries and territories	Irregular; read daily	Same day	Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Required attributions

Some of the licences above impose conditions on display. Those statements are reproduced here verbatim, and this section is the reason they are discharged in one place rather than depending on every future surface to remember them.

ucdp — Davies, Pettersson & Öberg (2026) Journal of Peace Research; Sundberg & Melander (2013) Introducing the UCDP GED. UCDP is funded by DEMSCORE (Swedish Research Council grant 2021-00162).
ncsc — Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
gdacs — Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS), a joint initiative of the United Nations and the European Commission.
uk-fcdo — Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Deliberately excluded

Licensing discipline is a design constraint here, not a preference: a source we may not redistribute is not in the feed at any volume, however useful it would be.

Source	Why it is not in the feed
ACLED	Redistribution prohibited by licence. Usable as an internal cross-check only, never as a published row.
UCDP via the Zenodo mirror	The Zenodo copy is ODbL (share-alike), which would be unacceptable for a commercial product. UCDP is taken ONLY from ucdp.uu.se, where it is CC BY 4.0.
CISA CSAF / KEV mirrors	Reachable, but CVE-level indicators. Argus publishes events, never IOCs — a deliberate positioning line, not a capability gap.
OpenSanctions	Defaults to CC BY-NC 4.0; commercial redistribution needs a paid reseller licence. Not in the published feed.
Australia DFAT Smartraveller travel advice	Blocks automated access: smartraveller.gov.au resets HTTP/2 streams and times out HTTP/1.1 for non-browser clients from both residential and GitHub-runner networks (probed 2026-09-05), and publishes no API or feed. The condition layer uses US State + UK FCDO; revisit if DFAT publishes machine-readable advice.
US MARAD maritime security advisories (MSCI) and UKMTO advisories	Both block non-browser clients: maritime.dot.gov answers 403 (Akamai) on every path including its RSS, ukmto.org 403 (Cloudflare), probed 2026-09-16; neither publishes an API. The security content that matters here — firing areas, mines, GPS interference — reaches the feed through NGA's in-force warnings instead; revisit if either publishes machine-readable advisories.

What this list does not promise

Coverage is uneven by construction. A theater’s score reflects the sources that actually cover it, which is why every surface shows the age of its freshest evidence. Two sources supply most of the rows and they fail in opposite directions: UCDP is curated and months behind, GDELT is minutes old and machine-coded (entering at low confidence, and promoted no further than medium when a primary source happens to corroborate it). Most of what remains is the hazard layer, which is matched by proximity and never enters a theater score at all. The primary-source geopolitical layer a reviewer would weigh most heavily — Taiwan MND, OFAC, IC3, NCSC — is the smallest of the three by volume: low hundreds of rows against several thousand. It carries the most evidential weight and the least of the count, and no surface should imply otherwise.
A coverage note above is already stale, and we would rather say so here. UCDP’s row still describes it as the largest contributor by volume. That was true until the GDELT ingest moved to the raw event exports on 2026-08-23; in the 120-day window the scores are computed over, the machine-coded export now contributes more rows. The register string is corrected at its next revision and the claim is recorded on the track record.
A source being listed is not a claim that it was reachable today. Every adapter drops and counts rather than failing, so a quiet source and a broken one look alike in the events alone — the daily health gate is what distinguishes them.
Redistribution terms are ours to honour, and yours. If you re-publish rows from the feed, the conditions above travel with them.