About

Sources and licences

A source’s licence is a check the code makes, not a paragraph in a policy. Where a source permits facts but not prose, this site can render its dates and names and cannot render its sentences.

The distinction that governs everything here

UN documents and official records — resolutions, meeting records, verbatim records, and public information material not offered for sale — are in the public domain worldwide under administrative instruction ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2 of 17 September 1987. They can be reproduced freely.

The text of un.org itself is not. Its terms reserve all rights and require permission in writing. We link to it and cite facts from it; we never mirror it.

Notes on each

Certificate Transparency logs

Subdomain discovery for the un.org family. CT is public by construction -- the logs exist to be read -- and observing it is passive. Carry util-ct's bound honestly: 'first seen by us' is a true statement, 'first issued' is not.

HTTP response headers

CSP, HSTS, referrer policy, permissions policy, cookie flags, server banner, and the TLS parameters of the connection that carried them. ONE ordinary GET per host per cycle, honouring robots.txt and the stated Crawl-delay. That is a page view, not a scan, and the difference is the request count.

Permanent Missions to the United Nations (the Blue Book)

The authoritative roster of accredited diplomats. Blue Book Online at bluebook.e-delegate.un.org is an Angular SPA whose API host (edelegate.unmeetings.org) does not resolve publicly and whose own paths answer 403 -- it is NOT a public data source and must not be scraped around. The usable path is the published PDF series ST/PLS/SER.A/*, which is an official document and therefore public domain. Spouses are listed in the source and are deliberately not ingested: they are private individuals who hold no office.

Public DNS

A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT (SPF), _dmarc, DNSSEC. Reading published DNS records is not scanning: the records are published to be resolved.

Public object-store index

Lookup against a third-party index of buckets that are ALREADY public. Passive: we query an index, we never enumerate a bucket and never fetch an object. Facts recorded are the bucket name, the index's own counts, and first/last seen. The index itself is not redistributed.

Published image metadata

EXIF/XMP/IPTC read from images the UN has itself published. The metadata is measured and reported; the image is not redistributed, because UN Photo is separately rights-reserved and sits outside ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2. Store the fields, never the file.

SERP API (Serper)

Discovery only: which UN hosts and pages exist, and which questions people actually ask. Result snippets are the search engine's, not ours, and are never rendered -- they are used to decide what to fetch from the primary source.

UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases

Public information material informing the public about UN activities and not offered for sale, so it falls inside ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2. Meeting summaries name who spoke and what they said, which is what makes a diplomat page more than a directory entry.

UN Statistics Division SDG Indicators API

Goals, targets, indicators, series and per-country observations.

United Nations Digital Library

Bibliographic spine: resolutions, meeting records, voting records, speeches. Enumerate via sitemap_index.xml.gz (142 sub-sitemaps, ~23.7k URLs each). Per-record MARCXML at /record/<id>?of=xm. The OAI-PMH endpoint at /oai2d answers Identify/ListSets/ListMetadataFormats but throttles ListIdentifiers and ListRecords with a bare 503 'Retry after 2 seconds' -- treat OAI as a supplement, never as the primary path.

United Nations Security Council Consolidated List

One XML document, regenerated daily, served via a redirect to an Azure blob with a short-lived SAS token -- follow redirects and do not cache the signed URL. Names living people under sanction: it is public by design and by Security Council decision, but it is still the sharpest personal data on the site. Never join it to any other person-shaped dataset.

United Nations Treaty Collection

MTDSG status tables: per treaty, per party, signature and ratification dates and declarations. Slow to respond and has timed out on first contact -- budget generous timeouts and retry rather than raising the rate.

United Nations website

Structure, navigation, entity names, office holders, dates. Never mirror page copy. Crawl-delay 10 is stated in robots.txt and is honoured as a commitment.

Wikidata

The entity spine: member states, organs, agencies, office holders and their term dates, with stable QIDs to resolve against. Coverage of permanent representatives is real but patchy -- 553 people across 111 country-specific positions, measured 2026-08-25 -- so it corroborates the Blue Book, it does not replace it.

Wikipedia

Share-alike is contagious: any page that reproduces Wikipedia prose verbatim must itself carry CC BY-SA 4.0. The site therefore uses Wikipedia for the lead-sentence summary only, clearly delimited and licensed in place, and never blends it into first-party prose.