How a music streaming executive built an open source global threat map in his spare time

Elie Habib no Working in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the largest music streaming platforms in the Middle East. But as missiles began flying across the region, the side project he had coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open source dashboard that people around the world were using to track the war in real time.

The engineer-turned-CEO built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral.

Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a period of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he began building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I’m committed to constantly learning new technologies regardless of my title as CEO,” Habib tells WIRED.

The idea came about when the headlines started colliding in ways that seemed impossible to follow. “It’s become really difficult to analyze the news,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, important metals, tensions escalating from every direction at once.”

Screenshots from Worldmonitor.com

Courtesy of WORLDMONITOR.COM

Traditional media was not solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that would show me how these events related to each other in real time. Existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large organizations tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

Taking the huge gap in the market as a challenge over the weekend, Habib started coding. “I built World Monitor in one day as a learning exercise,” he says. “The platform you see now reflects maybe five or six days of development plus community contributions.”

Signals from everywhere

The platform processes a chaotic stream of global data, cutting through the social media noise to pull the facts straight from the source.

Habib points out that “the system accommodates more than 100 data streams at one time.” The result is a constantly updated map of global tensions: conflict zones with degrees of escalation, military aircraft broadcast locations through ADS-B transponders, tracking ship movements through AIS signals, nuclear facilities, undersea cables, Internet outages, and satellite fire detection.

“Everything was normalized, geolocated, and displayed on a WebGL sphere capable of displaying thousands of markers without dropping frames,” Habib says.

The infrastructure is not built from scratch. Many of them are based on the same principles used to process massive amounts of streaming data.

Working with millions of music streams, Habib has taught how to build systems that ingest and process information at scale. “I have built Anghami and OSN+ data systems and have been inspired by a lot of lessons learned while building this tool,” he says. “Obviously the nature is very different, but the systems remain the same.” (OSN+ is a video streaming platform in the Middle East that is majority owned by Anghami.)