Building CDDBS: An LLM-Powered Disinformation Analysis System — Part 1: Architecture & Threat Model

What is CDDBS? CDDBS — the Cyber Disinformation Detection Briefing System — is an open-source intelligence analysis platform that detects disinformation narratives in media outlets and social media accounts. It ingests articles from the web, runs them through a structured LLM analysis pipeline, scores the output for quality, and matches it against a database of 18 known disinformation narratives. The result is a professional intelligence briefing — the kind an analyst at a think tank or government agency would write — produced in under a minute. TThis is the first post in a series where I'll walk through the technical architecture, the pipeline internals, the quality assurance system, and the operational infrastructure behind it. This isn't a weekend project write-up. CDDBS has been through six development sprints, 142 tests, and a production deployment on Render. The goal of this series is to show how the pieces fit together — and why we made the decisions we did. The Problem We're So