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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
>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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
> 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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 | a day ago
themafia | a day ago
varun_ch | a day ago
MattGaiser | a day ago
themafia | 23 hours ago
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.
simonw | 23 hours ago
psyklic | 23 hours ago
It clearly states on the page that the Factbook was continuously updated, with "new data uploaded this week".
tombert | 23 hours ago
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 | 23 hours ago
mmooss | 22 hours ago
thaumasiotes | 23 hours ago
throwawayq3423 | 23 hours ago
themafia | 23 hours ago
anigbrowl | 23 hours ago
arrowsmith | 21 hours ago
hulitu | 15 hours ago
mavhc | a day ago
rbanffy | 23 hours ago
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.
pxc | 23 hours ago
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
rbanffy | 22 hours ago
edsu | 10 hours ago
rbanffy | 5 hours ago
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.
eldavido | 23 hours ago
throwawayq3423 | 23 hours ago
verdverm | 23 hours ago
pseudalopex | 17 hours ago
rbanffy | 4 hours ago
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.
nl | 22 hours ago
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...
fkdjdshkajdh | 5 hours ago
neoromantique | 3 hours ago
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
mr_toad | 20 hours ago
They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.
red-iron-pine | 2 hours ago
these details are useful for things like immigration and asylum cases, and other complaints that involve the FedGov.
sixdimensional | 23 hours ago
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.
rbanffy | 23 hours ago
That’s a sound idea.
toomuchtodo | 22 hours ago
simonw | 21 hours ago
rbanffy | 4 hours ago
oxfeed65261 | 23 hours ago
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 | 21 hours ago
EarlKing | 20 hours ago
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
anigbrowl | 22 hours ago
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
simonw | 21 hours ago
hn_acc1 | 21 hours ago
hulitu | 15 hours ago
joezydeco | 5 hours ago
themafia | a day ago
callmeal | a day ago
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
csours | a day ago
cyberge99 | 23 hours ago
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
throwawayq3423 | 23 hours ago
> 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?
stopbulying | 11 hours ago
> 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
laughing_man | 8 hours ago
HWR_14 | 12 hours ago
sparrish | a day ago
simonklitj | 23 hours ago
kayo_20211030 | 23 hours ago
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
pseudalopex | 23 hours ago
Noaidi | 3 hours ago
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.
simonw | 23 hours ago
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.
shevy-java | 23 hours ago
transcriptase | 23 hours ago
How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
pjc50 | 12 hours ago
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)
pimlottc | 22 hours ago
secretballot | 20 hours ago
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 | 6 hours ago
throwawayq3423 | 23 hours ago
Most cuts to government are abrupt and unceremonious.
drecked | 23 hours ago
Isn’t this sufficient to keep it around, even if the facts themselves may be available on Wikipedia?
sandworm101 | 21 hours ago
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?
jfengel | 20 hours ago
You were by accident more factual than the administration can be deliberately.
CGamesPlay | 19 hours ago
mikeyouse | 19 hours ago
dwd | 17 hours ago
josephscott | 23 hours ago
edsu | 10 hours ago
jl6 | 23 hours ago
0xDEAFBEAD | 20 hours ago
FeistySkink | 23 hours ago
itsrobreally | 23 hours ago
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.
toomuchtodo | 22 hours ago
saguntum | 17 hours ago
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.
B1FF_PSUVM | 23 hours ago
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
simonw | 22 hours ago
And turned on GitHub Pages so you can browse it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
s0rce | 21 hours ago
Wowfunhappy | 21 hours ago
simonw | 21 hours ago
mediumsmart | 3 hours ago
toomuchtodo | 22 hours ago
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...
DaveZale | 21 hours ago
/s
crazygringo | 21 hours ago
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 | 21 hours ago
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
stopbulying | 10 hours ago
shmeeed | 8 hours ago
edsu | 10 hours ago
jfengel | 20 hours ago
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.
burnt-resistor | 17 hours ago
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.
t-3 | 15 hours ago
techblueberry | 9 hours ago
crazygringo | 5 hours ago
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.
kittikitti | 19 hours ago
LowLevelKernel | 14 hours ago
shmeeed | 8 hours ago
lxgr | 9 hours ago
Growing up, I was always impressed by the US’s commitment to putting excellent taxpayer-funded works like this into the public domain.
SpaceL10n | 8 hours ago
Gollapalli | 4 hours ago
personjerry | 3 hours ago
No accountability in the language
No rationale
No fucks given
What was the point of this post?