Passage — sourced safety & rights briefings, read for who you are

How safe and free will you actually be abroad — specific to who you are, every fact sourced and dated.

Live: https://mangluu.github.io/passage/

Anyone can ask an LLM "is X safe for someone like me?" and get a confident, fluent, personalised — and sometimes wrong — answer. For a decision where being wrong means detained, denied medication, or worse, fluency isn't enough. Passage is the opposite bet: every claim carries its evidence type, the date it reflects, its source, and how sure we are — and it says when it doesn't know. Provenance over plausibility.

Two ways in:

• Country × identity pages — "Is Japan safe for LGBTQ+ travellers?" (/safe/<code>/<identity>): a grounded verdict, the sourced facts that weigh most for you (concerns first), the full record, entry & emergency info. Prerendered as real static pages, one per country per identity.
• Compare with home — pick origin + destination + who you are; Passage ranks what changes for you by severity (anything the destination criminalises/enforces that's relevant to you is Critical), flags new duties on arrival (address registration, insurance mandates) as a checklist, and surfaces cross-cutting risks a search wouldn't volunteer (e.g. the return trip: cannabis legal there is still a felony at home).

The honesty bar (the whole point)

Passage is only worth using if it's more trustworthy than a guess. The rules the whole codebase follows:

• Every claim links to a source and shows its evidence type (Law / Published index / Reported practice / Advisory), the year it reflects, and a certainty label — established (grounded in an authoritative dataset or cross-checked primary source) vs limited (a reasonable band, not individually verified).
• Refuse, don't invent. No source for a country/topic → the field is blank ("no data"), never guessed. An earlier version had 0–100 "safety scores"; several were invented, so they were deleted in favour of the claims spine.
• Ask Passage answers by retrieval only over the verified claims — it cites every one and refuses when it has nothing verified, so it can't hallucinate.

Four identity lenses are each anchored to a real, current, machine-readable dataset, and only claims that clear the bar are promoted to established:

Lens	Anchor dataset
Women	World Bank — Women, Business and the Law
LGBTQ+	Equaldex — LGBT Legal Equality Index
Disabled	UN CRPD ratification (UN Treaty Collection)
Religion	Pew — Government Restrictions Index

Abortion access (UN DESA), same-sex law, blasphemy, anti-discrimination, entry rules and emergency numbers round out the spine. Person of colour is deliberately not shipped: there is no credible per-country dataset for it, and a page built on a proxy would break the bar that makes the other four trustworthy.

Privacy by design

• No account, no profile, no cookies, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. We never ask who you are.
• Your selections live only in the page URL, in your browser — never sent to a server. Pages are static.
• Fonts are self-hosted — the page makes no third-party requests. Hosting is GitHub Pages (logs IP at the server level, disclosed on the in-app Privacy page).

How it's built

Static React + Vite site, no backend, no database. Data is derived at build time from keyless public datasets and bundled into the page, so nothing is fetched in the user's browser.

src/
  data/
    jurisdictions.js  # the claims spine — 196 sovereign countries × sourced, dated claims
    topics.js         # topic catalog: position topics (ordered scale) + obligations (duties)
    audiences.js      # the five identity lenses → which topics weigh for each
    sources.js        # source registry (+ inline per-claim official sources)
    partners.js       # affiliate/partner config for the "Before you go" slot (empty until accounts exist)
    world.json        # GENERATED — every country × 9 published indices in 4 domains (Explore tier)
    signals.json / visa.json / emergency.json / cityPhotos.json   # GENERATED (see scripts/)
  lib/
    brief.js          # assembles the home→destination briefing (ranked changes, checklist, facts)
    profile.js        # single-country/identity read + grounded verdict (powers /safe pages)
    dashboard.js world.js signals.js visa.js emergency.js ask.js useTheme.js
  pages/              # Home · Briefing · Explore · SafeFor (/safe/:code/:aud) · Sources · Privacy · About
  entry-server.jsx    # SSR entry — renders a route to static HTML at build time
scripts/prerender.mjs # after build: writes one static HTML file per route (+ sitemap, robots, 404)

SEO / prerender: npm run build runs the client build, an SSR build, then scripts/prerender.mjs, which emits a static index.html per route (own <title>/meta/canonical + JSON-LD), a sitemap.xml, and a 404.html SPA fallback. Routing is BrowserRouter with base /passage/; the client mounts with createRoot, cleanly replacing the prerendered markup. So each country × identity page is a real, crawlable URL — and the same sourced data an LLM should be citing.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev        # → http://localhost:5173
npm run build      # client + SSR + prerender → static bundle in dist/ (deploys via GitHub Pages)

Contributing — help wanted

The most valuable contribution is verified, sourced data. Good first issues:

• Promote a limited claim to established — find a claim marked cert: 'limited' in jurisdictions.js, verify it against a primary/official source, and update the statement + src + asOf. (religious_freedom is limited for ~148 countries pending the full Pew GRI — a great target.)
• Add a claim for a specific country using the existing topic keys. Never invent a law name or date; if unsure, leave it limited or omit it.
• Add a data vertical — the pattern (src/data/topics.js + a Node script that bands a keyless dataset into per-country claims) is how the four lenses were built. See scripts/ and the commit history.
• Fix or extend the generated data — scripts/fetch-*.mjs rebuild world.json / signals.json / visa.json / emergency.json from public sources (OWID, Passport Index, Emergency Number API). Keyless.

One rule above all: cite everything, and be honest about certainty. A limited label is fine; a confident wrong established claim is the one thing that breaks the product.

On the roadmap (say hi if you want to take one): a freshness / change-tracking layer (what changed, and when), an MCP / API so AI assistants can ground on Passage's sourced claims, and institutional pilots (study-abroad offices, NGOs) that need auditable, current safety data.

Disclaimer

Passage is an informational project. Laws and indices are simplified and can be out of date; every claim shows its evidence type and certainty. Laws differ from lived experience, and this is not legal advice. Always confirm with official government channels before you travel. Built with only publicly available data and openly-licensed or original assets.