The CIA Erased The World Factbook With No Warning… And Told Everyone To ‘Stay Curious’
from the disappearing-facts dept
For over half a century, the CIA’s World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”
And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has “sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.
Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn’t mince words about what happened:
In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.
The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely..
That’s exactly right. If the CIA decided they no longer wanted to maintain the Factbook—fine. You could make an argument for that. But the decision to not just stop updating it, but to actively destroy access to it without any advance notice is something else entirely. You couldn’t even grab a final copy before it vanished.
The CIA’s official statement on the closure is a masterclass in saying nothing:
One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.
Okay and… why did you suddenly shut it down? They don’t say.
That’s followed by a brief history of the publication—it started classified in 1962, went unclassified in 1971, hit the web in 1997—and then this parting thought:
Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it… in person or virtually.
Gee, thanks. Super helpful. “We deleted the thing you relied on. Go touch grass or something.”
The New York Times reported that the shutdown happened while students at Boston University were literally in the middle of an open-Factbook exam:
The sudden closure of the Factbook’s website, with all of its entries no longer available to the public, left Jay Zagorsky’s business students at Boston University in the lurch midway through an exam due at midnight the next day.
His exams are regularly open-Factbook, and two questions relied on its famously tidy tables of economic certainty. In an instant, a trusted companion of lectures and late-night problem sets was gone.
“That was a great joy this afternoon,” Mr. Zagorsky said in an interview on Wednesday evening, recalling the moment faculty colleagues had begun talking to one another in disbelief. “Oh my god. What do we do? The Factbook just went offline? How do we let them finish the answers on the exams?”
Professors scrambling to figure out how to let students finish exams because a government agency couldn’t be bothered to give notice before nuking a 54-year-old publication. That’ll teach you to rely on anything from this government, I guess.
The Factbook wasn’t just a nice-to-have reference for academics. Lawyers have noted that it was regularly used in asylum cases as a trusted, objective source for country conditions (maybe that’s why they killed it?). When you’re trying to establish that a country is dangerous enough to warrant asylum, citing the CIA’s own publicly available data tends to carry some weight. That resource is now just… gone. With no replacement.
To try to salvage what he could of the Factbook, Willison took matters into his own hands. He found that until 2020, the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site to the Internet Archive. He downloaded the 2020 version and threw it up on GitHub with Pages enabled, so at least something remains accessible. It’s now six years out of date, but it’s better than the nothing the CIA has left us with.
And that’s what makes this so frustrating. The Factbook was public domain. It was created with taxpayer money. There was absolutely no legal or technical reason the CIA couldn’t have left the existing site up with a banner saying “no longer maintained” or given users time to archive their own copies. Instead, they chose to 302 redirect every single page to their farewell note, as if the goal was specifically to make sure no one could access anything.
There’s already a FOIA request in the works to try to obtain both the current data and the explanation for why this happened. But the fact that we need a FOIA request to find out why a public domain government reference tool was suddenly erased should tell you everything you need to know about where we are.
The Times did find one former intelligence official who wasn’t sad to see it go:
“C.I.A. is not the Library of Congress,” Ms. Sanner said with a laugh. “The intelligence community shouldn’t be your librarian.”
Sure. But when you’ve been the librarian for 54 years and people have built workflows around your library, you don’t get to just burn it down overnight and tell everyone to “stay curious.”
This has all the hallmarks of the current administration’s broader war on publicly available information. Data.gov scrubbed of climate information. USAID websites vanishing completely (along with the agency). Government research going dark. The World Factbook is just the latest casualty in what appears to be a systematic effort to make the federal government’s own information harder to access.
The CIA hasn’t said why they did this. It hasn’t said who made the decision. It didn’t even release the data in some other format. It just went dark and told everyone just to “stay curious about the world.”
Some of us are curious why our own government keeps removing public access to information.
Filed Under: cia, public domain, world factbook
Comments on “The CIA Erased The World Factbook With No Warning… And Told Everyone To ‘Stay Curious’”
Some of us already know. I mean, there’s a reason in re: the Epstein files that some Epstein associates were protected via redactions and some Epstein victims weren’t, and I’d bet it wasn’t “whoops we fucked up” for all (or even most) of those “mistakes”.
Oh, that’s easy. They shut it down because it has facts in it.
Re:
As was pointed out in the recent Wyden thread, the Factbook outright said that “investment in infrastructure, science, industry, and human capital have lagged” since World War 2, and that the U.S. is falling behind China economically.
As much as the public focuses on spy stories like James Bond and “Mission: Impossible”, a lot of the work of an intelligence agency is much more mundane. Collecting and organizing public facts (sometimes called “Open Source Intelligence”), as with the Factbook. Having agents live in foreign countries and just chatting with locals about what’s going on in the world and how they feel about it. After all, how can one have a coherent foreign policy without basic data like that? (Cf. the recent lack of coherent anything from the feds.)
Bingo! This follows closely on the heels of the lawsuits where the government was planning to drop asylum status for a bunch of countries and got slapped down… AND right on the heels of Wyden’s open letter about his private letter to the CIA.
Well, the easy answer is “Because a corrupt government’s worst enemy is a well-informed population”.
Re:
Yah. Hence the Grand Old Paedophiles’ largely-successful, decades-long, crusade against education.
I sincerely doubt most Trumpets are capable of parsing the language used to condemn them, at this point (if indeed they ever were, which is one hell of an assumption with those people, granted), because much of the English language has been kept hidden from them by endless redistricting and re-budgeting to concentrate what little educational resources are allowed into whiter and/or richer areas.
That’ll take well over a generation to fix, if it can be done. I’m not leaning optimistic.
Because now their main job is raping and murdering children.
Convicted Felon Donald Trump is starting to become as anti-intellectual as Pol Pot.
And comes to show the stupidity of libertarians and their whole “night watchman” state, which is really code for an ineffective government that does virtually nothing except the very bare minimum.
Re:
That’s cute, that you think he’s “starting to become” anti-intellectual.
I’d never heard of this before, but it looked useful so if course it was destroyed.
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I have never heard anyone cite nor even mention “CIA’s World Factbook”….ever. Literally ever. Which makes it sound like it was a giant waste of money.
Generally speaking, the US gov should never be involved in an editorial attempt to tell people what “facts” are, beyond statutory mandated research and survey functions. This is why gov involvement in NPR was such a problem.
You should check out Grokipedia. Pretty good, that.
Re:
That you, the world’s least informed internet troll, has never heard of it says way more about you than the World Factbook. It is, in fact, widely cited and used. I’ve used it for years.
You truly are very, very stupid.
I’ve seen 3 entries about things I know about. All of them blatantly, laughably wrong. It’s full of nonsense.
No wonder you like it.
The cruelty is the point.
CIA World Factbook
A lot of these are available on the Internet Archive.
Grab copies before they disappear.
Re:
Archive.org generally doesn’t delete data, and isn’t likely to voluntarily block access to archived government sites. See: As the Trump administration purges web pages, this group is rushing to save them, from nearly a year ago.
But also note that the pictured building is where the data is stored. It wouldn’t be very hard for goons to get in and cause trouble, nor would it be particularly surprising anymore.
They’ll reply to the FOIA with it’s classified for “national security” reasons.
The same “national security” reasons that they had to stop wind farms, it hurts Trump’s feelings.
Mr. Sanner is a dumbass. The CIA World Factbook is a useful piece of information for the CIA, that also happens to be something for which there is no reason to classify it. It’s just basic information about various countries in the world. Not secret stuff, just the basic surface level Random Country 101 every good intelligence officer dealing with a country should have memorized before doing any work related to it. So we bring ourselves to a question.
Is the CIA still creating and maintaining this information, but hiding it? If so, why? Nothing in the factbook was worth hiding. If it’s not still creating and maintaining this information source internally, why not? Isn’t that what a good Central Intelligence Agency should be doing?
Re:
And no one thought it was a library or a librarian. That’s such a weird-ass strawman that she can’t be anything but a dumbass.
If something is useful and a product of government, that’s all the reason republicans need to destroy it.
Just reinforces the view that facts are the enemy of the current administration.
Maybe the CIA got DOGEd. Now there’s a scary thought.
It has been removed to make space for The CIA’s Rapidly Rotating List of Shithole Countries.
Make America Great Again… By Ignoring What Is Happening In Other Countries?
Come on, we all know that the CIA secretly hired David Zaslav to do some “cleanup” like he’s been doing at Warner.
Now, it may be just a rumor, but Ellison seems to be interested into buying the CIA, mostly to “un-biais” it.
Truth is an existential threat to serial liars
The CIA hasn’t said why they did this. It hasn’t said who made the decision. It didn’t even release the data in some other format. It just went dark and told everyone just to “stay curious about the world.”
My guess is that someone in the regime said something monumentally stupid(heard to believe I know), someone pointed to The World Factbook to show that they were wrong, and in true republican fashion rather than admit that they were wrong before they demanded that the CIA kill the Factbook so that no-one else could fact-check them with it in the future.