The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.
CamperBob2 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
slg 2 days ago [-]
I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote. It being shutdown is more evidence of how broken the American political system is rather than an indication of the will of the people.
overfeed 2 days ago [-]
> I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote
That's just the specifics: Steve Bannon explicitly made it clear that one goal was to "dismantle the administrative state"
red-iron-pine 2 days ago [-]
Bannon is a global security threat, and a dangerous ideologue far surpassing Dugan
bdcravens 2 days ago [-]
As a single issue, probably not. However, the meta-issue that they did vote for was eliminating anything the government pays for (other than military, ICE, or related to drilling oil)
swed420 2 days ago [-]
The parent's point seems to be that since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
philipwhiuk 2 days ago [-]
Voting for the lesser of two evils is entirely how representative democracy works. You'll never see a representative who PERFECTLY represents your own views.
bdcravens 2 days ago [-]
Which is why we have so many single issue voters on things like immigration, abortion, etc, who can safely ignore all evils as long as their single checkbox is checked.
swed420 2 days ago [-]
> You'll never see a representative who PERFECTLY represents your own views.
Your strawman has no power here.
It's obvious when we're in a race to the bottom versus when we're making actual long-term progress that benefits a majority of voters.
ligne 2 days ago [-]
Holy false dilemma, Batman!
slg 2 days ago [-]
Maybe in the philosophical sense in that this is what their vote wrought, but there is absolutely no way to conclude that people wanted their institutions dismantled. The number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump was nearly identical in 2020 and 2024 once we compensate for population growth (22.4% of the population vs 22.7%). Anyone making drastic conclusions on the will of the people is just making something up whether they are conscious of that or not.
jfengel 2 days ago [-]
What changed is the number of people who decided they were ok with dismantling institutions. That grew by about 7 million, who voted for the opponent in 2020 but stayed home in 2024.
So perhaps the number of people who wanted institutions dismantled remained the same. But the will of the people as a whole changed sharply, mostly because of people who decided it wasn't worth the effort to oppose it.
slg 2 days ago [-]
>What changed is the number of people who decided they were ok with dismantling institutions. That grew by about 7 million, who voted for the opponent in 2020 but stayed home in 2024.
How do you know this? How can you say the deciding factor was dismantling institutions rather than inflation, Palestine, misogyny against a female candidate, or any number of countless other good or bad reasons to have stayed home? You can't treat a single binary choice for red or blue like it was a referendum on every single individual issue.
simonw 2 days ago [-]
Right, World Factbook single issue voters probably don't exist.
That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.
I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.
The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.
oldmanhorton 2 days ago [-]
Sure, but this is based on a fundamental trust in governments ability to spend money effectively. The ineffective spending has been in the news way more than the effective spending, so some people take this to mean all of the spending is ineffective.
I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?
brightball 2 days ago [-]
It's a simple question of economics and observation.
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
brightball 2 days ago [-]
I think a tremendous amount of people want value for their money. It's one of the reasons so many people talk about cutting government spending where it's wasteful, operating with a balanced budget and reducing the trillions of dollars in debt that we've accrued...which will eventually devalue all of our money.
selimthegrim 2 days ago [-]
RIP Carmen Sandiego players.
redeeman 2 days ago [-]
wouldnt it then be significantly better if you and others who want "value for their money" spend your own money making a world factbook, and then let people who dont much care not spend on it?
isnt this fair and equitable? you wouldnt pay for your neighbors lawnmower or cybertruck either?
ligne 2 days ago [-]
This is all information the government will need to collate anyway. How much money do you think they'll save by not publishing it for others to use, exactly?
redeeman 2 days ago [-]
"will need".... and why exactly do they need that? I could easily envision that the government in fact does not collate such
simonw 2 days ago [-]
No.
redeeman 2 days ago [-]
well you know, I could use a cybertruck, i suppose you'll step up and chip in?
cucumber3732842 2 days ago [-]
I think it's a pretty strong condemnation of the CIA that they can't find something more important to flamboyantly kill though.
nope, us Americans are truly the kind of people to vote for him, no matter how bad a reason each of them had
russdill 2 days ago [-]
Very much "that's not who we are! ... Checks history book, oh, oh ,oh my".
Much more apt to say "that's not who we aspire to be'
trumpisafaggot 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
simonw 2 days ago [-]
I managed to pull a zip file archive of the 2020 edition from the Internet Archive - I've uploaded the contents of that zip file to this GitHub repo: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020
It works remarkably well there too. Thanks CIA for making a website that is (was) easy to archive.
2 days ago [-]
sparrish 2 days ago [-]
I remember doing research in the print version of the World Factbook back in college days. It was the most accurate and up-to-date info we could get on countries before the Interwebs. RIP.
drecked 2 days ago [-]
> Finally, only CIA insiders would know that officers donated some of their personal travel photos to The World Factbook, which hosted more than 5,000 photographs that were copyright-free for anyone to access and use.
Isn’t this sufficient to keep it around, even if the facts themselves may be available on Wikipedia?
sandworm101 2 days ago [-]
Facts are, today, a threat. An encyclopedia of facts about various countries, published by a respected US agency, is dangerous.
What if public policy changes? What if it is announced that there are millions of jewish people living in Iran? A CIA website claiming that there are in fact far fewer than millions would fly in the face of declared national policy. We cannot have a list of official "facts", not when new facts are being announced almost daily.
How could one ever justify invading greenland to save all those penguins when the CIA's own website states that the penguin popultion of greenland increased by 27% in the last five years?
dwd 2 days ago [-]
"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
jfengel 2 days ago [-]
I suspect that may literally be true. 127% of 0 is 0.
You were by accident more factual than the administration can be deliberately.
CGamesPlay 2 days ago [-]
You say this, but the opposite is equally true. Why should I trust the CIA's website when it says that there are no penguins in Greenland, and so there's no ecological harm to strip mining the place?
mikeyouse 2 days ago [-]
Well I would hope that's what the Factbook would say since penguins exclusively live in the Southern Hemisphere.
B1FF_PSUVM 2 days ago [-]
Back in the peak-paper days - when the Sunday newspaper was for the man "smart enough to read it and strong enough to carry it", and the Computer Shopper magazine vied with phone directories for thickness - you could go into a gas station and pick up a paperback copy of the CIA World Factbook, usually from a shelf also sporting the Rand McNally road maps.
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
lxgr 2 days ago [-]
This brings back memories: The Factbook was one of my favorite “ebooks” on Palm OS (especially before SD card support arrived and made carrying full Wikipedia dumps feasible).
Growing up, I was always impressed by the US’s commitment to putting excellent taxpayer-funded works like this into the public domain.
SpaceL10n 2 days ago [-]
An intelligent person would have given us a reason or some reassurance as to why losing "One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications" is not something to worry about. Unless, said intelligent person is giving us warning. Tinfoil hat firmly glued on.
helle253 2 days ago [-]
why in the world is this being sunset i wonder
sixdimensional 2 days ago [-]
I concur.
Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.
This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.
Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.
It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.
simonw 2 days ago [-]
As far as I can tell the single zip downloadable versions stopped being published after 2020. I grabbed a copy of the 2020 zip from the Internet Archive and turned it into a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
EarlKing 2 days ago [-]
Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame.
Agreed. Though perhaps they will open source some stuff. What would interest me is HOW they got the information they showed.
simonw 2 days ago [-]
It was all released into the public domain already. If you can obtain a copy it's yours to do what you like with.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
Every country puts out an official gazette with abundant regulatory and statistical information. Of course you'd be foolish to rely on all these at face value, but it's an excellent starting point for assessing the economic activity of any given country. You can then synthesize it with things like market data and publicly available shipping information. Plus the CIA has (at least I hope it still has) a large staff of people whose only job is to study print, broadcast, and electronic media about other countries and compile that into regular reports of What Goes On There.
Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s
hulitu 2 days ago [-]
Social media is much more suited to spread propaganda.
joezydeco 2 days ago [-]
Metafilter has a theory: "Apparently the judge in the Haitian TPS case cited the Factbook in her injunction ruling. There's quite a bit of speculation that that's why it's gone now."
2 days ago [-]
mavhc 2 days ago [-]
Facts are not a thing the government is interested in now
mr_toad 2 days ago [-]
> Facts are not a thing the government is interested in now
They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.
red-iron-pine 2 days ago [-]
in particular, these are facts that are officially released by an organ of the US Government responsible for accurate information.
these details are useful for things like immigration and asylum cases, and other complaints that involve the FedGov.
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
Nor is soft power.
The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.
eldavido 2 days ago [-]
I'd be interested to see concrete examples of this, if they exist.
verdverm 2 days ago [-]
by "this"... that the current US govt isn't interested in soft power?
pseudalopex 2 days ago [-]
They wanted examples of propaganda in the World Factbook probably.
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
It starts with framing the CIA as a neutral entity, which it is not. It's a form of metapropaganda, in which a propaganda outlet characterizes itself as a neutral provider of information.
One example that comes to mind is Patrice Lumumba's assassination, allegedly authorized by the American government. There is no mention to Lumumba's government that started in 1960.
Venezuela's entry has the same issue pointed out in the DPRK's - the negative impact of sanctions imposed by the US on the economy is not mentioned, and is described as "chaotic economy due to political corruption".
It is subtle, but it is propaganda as well.
throwawayq3423 2 days ago [-]
I would also like to see a comparison to prove the point.
nl 2 days ago [-]
> you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships,
The World Fact Book doesn't have this kind of commentary. For example read the entry on North Korea. I've excerpted the most critical parts here, and I think they are a long way from your characterization:
> After the end of Soviet aid in 1991, North Korea faced serious economic setbacks that exacerbated decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation.
> New economic development plans in the 2010s failed to meet government-mandated goals for key industrial sectors, food production, or overall economic performance. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korea instituted a nationwide lockdown that severely restricted its economy and international engagement.
> As of 2024, despite slowly renewing cross-border trade with China, North Korea remained one of the world's most isolated countries and one of Asia's poorest
Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation, as well as its isolation. Yep, that's a classic trick with State Department propaganda. There are never any huge whoppers, instead the lies they tell are through omission and the subtle shifting of blame ("If Venezuela didn't want to be bombed, they should have given us their oil", etc) in order to craft a narrative that's incongruent with reality.
neoromantique 2 days ago [-]
>Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
red-iron-pine 1 days ago [-]
also the nukes. and shooting missiles over japan.
parent poster seems to want to ignore their decades of poor behavior and sheer brutality.
e.g. NK just executed people for watching squid game.
shevy-java 2 days ago [-]
While that is true, the current government makes heavy use of propaganda too.
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
True, but they have abandoned the subtlety of the factbook.
edsu 2 days ago [-]
The suggestion that obvious propaganda is somehow better than "subtle" propaganda is itself propaganda.
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
Obvious propaganda plays a role in the destruction of a shared objective reality, which is part of the authoritarian playbook. Subtle propaganda distorts reality but preserves the notion of a shared objective one and does not intend to undermine trust.
When a government uses blatant, easily disproven lies, but doubles down on the lies and continues with increasingly absurd ones, there is no space for subtlety or trustworthy sources in that government.
pxc 2 days ago [-]
Yep. This seems somewhat similar in motivation to the cuts to USAID.
hn_acc1 2 days ago [-]
To avoid pesky facts getting in the way of them attempting to re-write history, like in 1984 (the book).
themafia 2 days ago [-]
The internet now exists and easily surpasses the value of this static publication.
varun_ch 2 days ago [-]
The World Factbook was a really useful resource on the internet.
thaumasiotes 2 days ago [-]
The existence of secondary sources doesn't reduce the need for primary sources. Before something can be published everywhere, it has to be published somewhere.
throwawayq3423 2 days ago [-]
Not if everything is made up on the spot for clicks and views, which is where we're heading.
arrowsmith 2 days ago [-]
The CIA World Factbook is a tertiary source.
hulitu 2 days ago [-]
But treated by Wikipedia as _the_ primary source. /s
red-iron-pine 1 days ago [-]
it is an official release put out by an organ of the US government responsible for creating intelligence.
presumably their facts are undergoing vetting and validation.
thaumasiotes 1 days ago [-]
Yes, I was surprised by the overwhelming consensus here that the CIA, which is responsible for knowing what's true about other countries, doesn't do any validation of the claims they make about other countries.
themafia 2 days ago [-]
The CIA was a secondary source. This bulk of this material is all drawn from other publications. Which you can now access in ways you could not before.
anigbrowl 2 days ago [-]
We get it, you can't see any utility in having this information aggregated anywhere in a consistent format.
MattGaiser 2 days ago [-]
This is an odd thing to say for something heavily used on the internet. It was not just a physical book.
themafia 2 days ago [-]
> It was not just a physical book.
It was. You were able to access a copy on the internet. It was neither edited nor published there. As such it simply couldn't compete with resources that are.
It clearly states on the page that the Factbook was continuously updated, with "new data uploaded this week".
tombert 2 days ago [-]
Has it though? Isn't one of the concerns of information on the internet (regardless of political affiliation) that a lot of it is total bullshit?
I've seen so many responses from AI and AI "Summaries" that source claims from 20 year old unsourced forum posts. For that matter, people just make shit up, all the time, often for no apparent reason. It's upsetting that it took me until my 30's to realize that, but regardless I think there is value in canonical, well-funded sources, even with the internet.
cyberge99 2 days ago [-]
I think the quality of internet content depends on where you lurk and contribute.
mmooss 2 days ago [-]
in what social venue do you find high-quality content? I don't know of any that come close to matching serious publications, IME.
kayo_20211030 2 days ago [-]
Waaaht? And, why? Budgets? This is/was a wonderful resource. I'll be sad to see the back of it.
shevy-java 2 days ago [-]
The why is a good question. I don't think it is the budget; to me it seems more as if Wikipedia kind of phased it out.
pseudalopex 2 days ago [-]
Wikipedia used it. And it had much information not in Wikipedia. And it was concise. And its structure was consistent.
Noaidi 2 days ago [-]
Yes, budgets. They need to cancel this maybe $100K website to fund the $500 Trillion defense budget increase.
It will be replaced by the new CIA factbook which will tell us it is the destiny for the white race to rule the world.
I was thinking it would be nice to have a final print edition for the book collection, Amazon seems to be under the impression that this newer version is coming out in April.
Does this mean the CIA is also going to pull all the archives too?
LowLevelKernel 2 days ago [-]
Does your local library still have any? I checked in a couple of libraries in CA and NV, and, I did find old ones
shmeeed 2 days ago [-]
Even the Library of Congress seems to have only the 1992 and 1993 editions (or maybe I'm just too dumb to search). Unfathomable.
aaron695 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
FeistySkink 2 days ago [-]
Huh. I had a native Android app way back when on the Play Store, that presented the Factbook in the mobile-friendly manner. Was quite popular in Africa of all places. But ultimately had to first delist it and then close the account altogether, once Google started requiring more and more unnecessary SDK updates, and ultimately identity verification. What a trip down the memory lane.
throwawayq3423 2 days ago [-]
At least they let the people behind it give a farewell message.
Most cuts to government are abrupt and unceremonious.
simonklitj 2 days ago [-]
Ah, was just finishing a geography quiz game with this as one of the fact sources. Oh well!
2 days ago [-]
themafia 2 days ago [-]
I don't know that the Schlesinger memo was real but I think it's conclusions were perfect. The CIA needs to be split into two divisions. The research division and the operations division.
HWR_14 2 days ago [-]
Isn't it split into a research/analysis and an operations division already?
callmeal 2 days ago [-]
They should all just go home. They already won. Remember this quote?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
throwawayq3423 2 days ago [-]
> This quote, often phrased as "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," is widely attributed to William J. Casey, who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA) under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987.
> While frequently cited in literature and discussions about propaganda and media manipulation, the quote's authenticity is highly disputed and unverified.
> I don't believe anything in Team B was really true
> [...]
> Casey was convinced that there was a single, organized network of evil in the world, [...]
He found the proof he was looking for in a book called The Terror Network
The Power of Nightmares | Part 2 : The Phantom Victory | Adam Curtis Ful... https://youtube.com/watch?v=KolgBqJ95ug?t=6m16s re: Casey, Reagan, Bush, Wolfowitz and why we've spent trillions saving the world from such dastardly evil since Carter's record-setting low EJK term (which was affected by oil price shock)
Somebody like Casey might think that, but I seriously doubt he'd ever actually say it, except as a joke.
shevy-java 2 days ago [-]
Well - the easier take-away is that the general public can not trust any of those top organisations. I think when a citizen can not trust the government anymore (in any country, at the least in a democracy), this is worrying. It's then more like the novel 1984 - while that referred primarily to the Soviet Union (Big Brother referred to Stalin for the most part), one could also find so many correlations to a "strong man"-led democracy too.
csours 2 days ago [-]
There Is No Disinformation Department.
shevy-java 2 days ago [-]
Everyone should read 1984! It is such a time-less classic.
cyberge99 2 days ago [-]
I see what you did there.
socalgal2 23 hours ago [-]
I'm going to take the downvotes but at what point should something like this be taken down? Some of you might say "never" but come on, the thing was started in 1962. If you wanted info on anything back then you had to go to the library and cross your fingers they had a book for whatever you wanted to know.
That world is long gone. Today we have Wikipedia, Our World in Data, and every government in the world has web pages from every agency.
I loved the World Factbook. I can also see that it's out lived its purpose.
handstitched 22 hours ago [-]
Look at the wikipedia page for any given country, and I guarantee you that it cites the CIA World Factbook at least once (and probably several times [1] ). Saying "we don't need the world factbook because we have Wikipedia" is completely ridiculous.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, meaning it's not a primary source of facts but rather an aggregate of information published elsewhere.
irrelevant. thy cite the CIA fact book because it expect, not because its the only source. they’ll just start citing something else like the country’s official stats, or the UN, or something else
Gollapalli 2 days ago [-]
This is such a loss
jl6 2 days ago [-]
What is now a good source of aggregated population statistics?
Hmmm. They do not mention Wikipedia, but the CIA book kind of had information about countries for a very long time. I get that Wikipedia would objectively make more sense; so while it may make sense to stop investing resources into the CIA book, I still think it would be better to keep tabs on the content of Wikipedia. Kind of like a secondary quality control. It may not be hugely important here, but if 100.000 other websites vanish, I still think it may be an indirect problem for Wikipedia, as all its presented facts may become increasingly more and more circular to itself - which is made worse by AI slop spamming down the global quality.
pimlottc 2 days ago [-]
Kids who grew up playing Carmen Sandiego will definitely remember it fondly
secretballot 2 days ago [-]
I played a bunch of that too, was that a cited source for it? Don’t remember. I do recall that the very-early-90s geopolitics simulation game Shadow President contained large portions of the fact book in its in-game information system (with citations, which is my first recollection of ever knowing of the thing by name)
I later leaned on the Web version of the factbook quite a bit for basic country stats in undergrad.
I don’t know of a replacement of comparable quality. Damn good resource. Not that you can necessarily trust a government source, and especially one from an intelligence agency, but most of what it covered wasn’t exactly useful for the kind of propaganda you’d expect the US government to push, so you could expect it to broadly be a sincere attempt at describing reality (it didn’t hurt that it wasn’t a super-widely-known resource outside certain academic disciplines, so lying about e.g. the major exports of Guyana or whatever wouldn’t have much effect anyway, lowering the likelihood that anyone would bother)
pimlottc 2 days ago [-]
Whoops, I was mistaken, I was thinking of The World Almanac and Book of Facts that was included in the original version of the game as a player reference.
2 days ago [-]
transcriptase 2 days ago [-]
As it stands you only need a few friends or likeminded journalists at a few major publications to repeat the same falsehood, and it becomes a properly cited fact on Wikipedia and in the public eye for as long as you need it to be. If it’s later proven to be a falsehood and the underlying sources quietly issue retractions it doesn’t matter.
How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
pjc50 2 days ago [-]
Given how all that vanished once Trump won, the propaganda having served its purpose, it seems my decision to write it off as chaff was vindicated.
Remember "lock her up?" Remember how that vanished as well and there was not, in fact, any effort to lock her up?
(the problem of submarining stuff into Wikipedia is real though, and a by-product of it being the most trusted reference)
personjerry 2 days ago [-]
> ... has sunset
No accountability in the language
No rationale
No fucks given
What was the point of this post?
theturtle 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
DaveZale 2 days ago [-]
they swapped out the "t" for an "e"
/s
crazygringo 2 days ago [-]
It made sense in an age of print. But in the era of Wikipedia it's not really needed anymore. If you want population statistics or whatever, Wikipedia will tell you and link to the country's own official metrics. You don't need the CIA to collate it all for you.
And, as multiple commenters here have noted, it's on the Internet Archive. So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end.
simonw 2 days ago [-]
It hasn't been a print-first publication in many years - the site was updated weekly.
It's also where a lot of the facts on Wikipedia came from. This is a real loss.
I trust CIA over official population numbers from a lot of countries. There was a thread on here recently that pointed out a lot of countries haven't conducted an effective census in many years, if at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46810027
edsu 2 days ago [-]
Yes, apart from the loss of the publication as a historical artifact, it is the loss of the continuing process that kept it up to date as a representation of the present (with whatever flaws you always have with such representations).
stopbulying 2 days ago [-]
Hopefully the next admin will regain an understanding of the value of the World Facebook collection of somewhat-vetted facts and opinions.
shmeeed 2 days ago [-]
Please no World Facebook
stopbulying 20 hours ago [-]
What if they call theirs Truthbook Bader Ginsberg? Like RBGPAC
jfengel 2 days ago [-]
Wikipedia isn't a source. Wikipedia gathers data from elsewhere, including the World Factbook.
Wikipedia has other sources for most of that information. It comes from organizations like the UN, which the administration detests, and now lacks its own way of gathering that information.
t-3 2 days ago [-]
Wikipedia is nowhere near the same level of quality or trustworthiness.
techblueberry 2 days ago [-]
Start paying attention to references next time you look for a piece of factual information about a country.
crazygringo 2 days ago [-]
...I do?
A lot of stuff in Wikipedia doesn't have great references, but for the types of stats and facts in the World Factbook, it's generally quite excellent.
burnt-resistor 2 days ago [-]
> It made sense in an age of print.
Reading books is still important. That has nothing to do with the CIA factbook website edition.
Archiving copies of internet-published information is important, especially when a regime lies, tries to rewrite history, and destroys knowledge and public resources regularly.
> So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end
Self-fulfilling prophecy, learned-helplessness doomer fallacy. It only ended because some assholes ended it.
kittikitti 2 days ago [-]
Why would anyone trust this? Even as a small child, I found their "Factbook" to be highly dubious. I bet MAGA hated the pages on Greenland, Venezuela, and Israel; even when presented with distorted facts. I'll give the CIA credit for taking it down before MIGA forced them to publish obvious propaganda. That's something Mossad is better suited for. These intelligence agencies have lost all of their reputation and credibility.
Rendered at 08:43:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/
The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.
That's just the specifics: Steve Bannon explicitly made it clear that one goal was to "dismantle the administrative state"
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki...
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
Your strawman has no power here.
It's obvious when we're in a race to the bottom versus when we're making actual long-term progress that benefits a majority of voters.
So perhaps the number of people who wanted institutions dismantled remained the same. But the will of the people as a whole changed sharply, mostly because of people who decided it wasn't worth the effort to oppose it.
How do you know this? How can you say the deciding factor was dismantling institutions rather than inflation, Palestine, misogyny against a female candidate, or any number of countless other good or bad reasons to have stayed home? You can't treat a single binary choice for red or blue like it was a referendum on every single individual issue.
That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.
I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.
The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.
I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
isnt this fair and equitable? you wouldnt pay for your neighbors lawnmower or cybertruck either?
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/13/budget-pol... (you can stop reading after the first couple paragraphs, it goes into federal budget politics circa 2013)
Much more apt to say "that's not who we aspire to be'
And turned on GitHub Pages so you can browse it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
Clicking the link seems to show 114 photos:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
I didn't see a way to get high-resolution versions.
Edit: This photo from Afghanistan is called "AF_006_large.jpg", but it's only 600x450:
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/e926b79682b14c...
https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/attachments...
Isn’t this sufficient to keep it around, even if the facts themselves may be available on Wikipedia?
What if public policy changes? What if it is announced that there are millions of jewish people living in Iran? A CIA website claiming that there are in fact far fewer than millions would fly in the face of declared national policy. We cannot have a list of official "facts", not when new facts are being announced almost daily.
How could one ever justify invading greenland to save all those penguins when the CIA's own website states that the penguin popultion of greenland increased by 27% in the last five years?
You were by accident more factual than the administration can be deliberately.
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
Growing up, I was always impressed by the US’s commitment to putting excellent taxpayer-funded works like this into the public domain.
Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.
This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.
Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.
It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...
That’s a sound idea.
Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s
They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.
these details are useful for things like immigration and asylum cases, and other complaints that involve the FedGov.
The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.
One example that comes to mind is Patrice Lumumba's assassination, allegedly authorized by the American government. There is no mention to Lumumba's government that started in 1960.
Venezuela's entry has the same issue pointed out in the DPRK's - the negative impact of sanctions imposed by the US on the economy is not mentioned, and is described as "chaotic economy due to political corruption".
It is subtle, but it is propaganda as well.
The World Fact Book doesn't have this kind of commentary. For example read the entry on North Korea. I've excerpted the most critical parts here, and I think they are a long way from your characterization:
> After the end of Soviet aid in 1991, North Korea faced serious economic setbacks that exacerbated decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation.
> New economic development plans in the 2010s failed to meet government-mandated goals for key industrial sectors, food production, or overall economic performance. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korea instituted a nationwide lockdown that severely restricted its economy and international engagement.
> As of 2024, despite slowly renewing cross-border trade with China, North Korea remained one of the world's most isolated countries and one of Asia's poorest
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
parent poster seems to want to ignore their decades of poor behavior and sheer brutality.
e.g. NK just executed people for watching squid game.
When a government uses blatant, easily disproven lies, but doubles down on the lies and continues with increasingly absurd ones, there is no space for subtlety or trustworthy sources in that government.
presumably their facts are undergoing vetting and validation.
It was. You were able to access a copy on the internet. It was neither edited nor published there. As such it simply couldn't compete with resources that are.
It clearly states on the page that the Factbook was continuously updated, with "new data uploaded this week".
I've seen so many responses from AI and AI "Summaries" that source claims from 20 year old unsourced forum posts. For that matter, people just make shit up, all the time, often for no apparent reason. It's upsetting that it took me until my 30's to realize that, but regardless I think there is value in canonical, well-funded sources, even with the internet.
It will be replaced by the new CIA factbook which will tell us it is the destiny for the white race to rule the world.
https://www.amazon.com/CIA-World-Factbook-2025-2026/dp/15107...
I couldn't find a PDF or archive of the site online (other than the obvious archive.org) but I didn't look very hard.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/151078604X/
I was thinking it would be nice to have a final print edition for the book collection, Amazon seems to be under the impression that this newer version is coming out in April.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...
Most cuts to government are abrupt and unceremonious.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
> While frequently cited in literature and discussions about propaganda and media manipulation, the quote's authenticity is highly disputed and unverified.
Are you trying to be ironic?
> I don't believe anything in Team B was really true
> [...]
> Casey was convinced that there was a single, organized network of evil in the world, [...] He found the proof he was looking for in a book called The Terror Network
The Power of Nightmares | Part 2 : The Phantom Victory | Adam Curtis Ful... https://youtube.com/watch?v=KolgBqJ95ug?t=6m16s re: Casey, Reagan, Bush, Wolfowitz and why we've spent trillions saving the world from such dastardly evil since Carter's record-setting low EJK term (which was affected by oil price shock)
The Power of Nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
That world is long gone. Today we have Wikipedia, Our World in Data, and every government in the world has web pages from every agency.
I loved the World Factbook. I can also see that it's out lived its purpose.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, meaning it's not a primary source of facts but rather an aggregate of information published elsewhere.
[1] - some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia - cites the factbook 4 times; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbekistan - cites it twice
I later leaned on the Web version of the factbook quite a bit for basic country stats in undergrad.
I don’t know of a replacement of comparable quality. Damn good resource. Not that you can necessarily trust a government source, and especially one from an intelligence agency, but most of what it covered wasn’t exactly useful for the kind of propaganda you’d expect the US government to push, so you could expect it to broadly be a sincere attempt at describing reality (it didn’t hurt that it wasn’t a super-widely-known resource outside certain academic disciplines, so lying about e.g. the major exports of Guyana or whatever wouldn’t have much effect anyway, lowering the likelihood that anyone would bother)
How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
Remember "lock her up?" Remember how that vanished as well and there was not, in fact, any effort to lock her up?
(the problem of submarining stuff into Wikipedia is real though, and a by-product of it being the most trusted reference)
No accountability in the language
No rationale
No fucks given
What was the point of this post?
/s
And, as multiple commenters here have noted, it's on the Internet Archive. So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end.
It's also where a lot of the facts on Wikipedia came from. This is a real loss.
I trust CIA over official population numbers from a lot of countries. There was a thread on here recently that pointed out a lot of countries haven't conducted an effective census in many years, if at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46810027
Wikipedia has other sources for most of that information. It comes from organizations like the UN, which the administration detests, and now lacks its own way of gathering that information.
A lot of stuff in Wikipedia doesn't have great references, but for the types of stats and facts in the World Factbook, it's generally quite excellent.
Reading books is still important. That has nothing to do with the CIA factbook website edition.
Archiving copies of internet-published information is important, especially when a regime lies, tries to rewrite history, and destroys knowledge and public resources regularly.
> So let's just cherish it as another print tradition that would inevitably end
Self-fulfilling prophecy, learned-helplessness doomer fallacy. It only ended because some assholes ended it.