And turned on GitHub Pages so you can browse it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
HTTP/2 302
content-length: 0
location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/
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at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.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 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?
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)
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?
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
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
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.
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...
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 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".
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.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_letter_to_d...
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?
Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
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?
/s