RIP: The CIA World Factbook

[thewayne]

The internal classified version was started in 1962 as The National Basic Intelligence Factbook. It was a resource that gave you very detailed information about countries around the world: form of government, economic information, population and make-up, etc. Very useful information. It went public in 1971 as the World Factbook and later joined the World Wide Web in 1997 in an unclassified version. It was available between '71 and '97 in print form and on CD.

And now it's gone. Any page for any country that you may have had linked now redirects to the closure notice. Everything's now inaccessible. Of course, you can still look into it via archive.org, but the information was updated regularly when the site was live, and it will now grow increasingly stale.

No reason given. The CIA was subject to the same chainsaw-trimming that most other government agencies were given courtesy of DOGE and the Muskbrats. We also have the intense administration's dislike of facts. Either or both could have contributed to its demise.

But with a little luck, in a possibly truthier future, it could be resurrected. There's no doubt that the CIA found the resource useful, so it may again become available to the public in a better tomorrow.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-cia-stops-publishing-the-world-factbook-184419024.html

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/05/187252/cia-has-killed-off-the-world-factbook-after-six-decades

EDIT: added Slashdot link.

Comments

[kathmandu]

I used that in college. It was a nice, quiet resource that was just *there*.

RIP.

[thewayne]

I didn't use it often, but it was like having an encyclopedia in your house when you wanted some quick info at hand.  Very handy.  I shall miss it.

[disneydream06]

The Felon doesn't want us to know about his "friends", aka fellow dictators? :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

As I recall, it didn't really get into the nuts and bolts of political operations.  It would, for example, probably describe Iran as a religious theocracy with a parliament and an elected ayatollah.  I'm not sure what it would make of Myanmar.

[disneydream06]

Religious Theocracy kind of describes our mess. :o

[thewayne]

Yep.  And Congress is complicit despite what the Constitution clearly says.

[disneydream06]

AMEN, so to speak. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[white_aster]

RIP, useful info!

My guess is that the people who actually did the researching and the writing were RIFed, and they took it down now because it was becoming embarrassingly obvious that it was not being updated. That sort of task is for desk jockeys, people with "writer" or "policy" or "communications" in their title, and the communications and policy folks got axed in every agency.

[thewayne]

That's my belief.  Sort of like how IT is viewed as a cost, not benefitting the entire organization, since they don't generate revenue.

[white_aster]

Yeah. "support staff" in general got the ax. Which of course makes everyone else's lives harder and less efficient, because now your super expensive and supposedly prized FDA reviewer is...having to book their own travel and research their own hotels when they go on inspections. (or sit twiddling their thumbs because their computer went down and IT is short on people to fix it.) Because THAT is a great use of that person's time. (not saying one's more "valuable" than the other, just that you can get that travel booked faster and that person's computer back on the road more efficiently if you actually pay people to do that work rather than shunting it off on whoever survived the cuts.)

Classic decisionmaking from someone who never actually worked in a company, just lorded over it from the C-suite.

[halfshellvenus]

Aw. I hope it's been saved in various library archives across the country/world.

You know, our son had a Natural Disaster course in college where students were required to pick a disaster type and country for a paper. He chose Haiti and earthquakes, and sometimes the ONLY good source for the various economic impacts of catastrophic events was online records compiled by the CIA. :O

[thewayne]

It's quite a shame.  I wonder if there is anything similar offered by other countries, or if they may be planning something.

[silveradept]

Most likely, it was something put out that was useful, but was at the end of the funding chain, and so when the chainsaw came, that was something axed because having an unclassified dossier on the countries of the world would be completely useless for intelligence purposes. Because these people do not understand the value of what they are destroying. If they did, they wouldn't do it.

[thewayne]

Much like IT departments and MBA C-suites who view it as only a cost, not as something that benefits the organization, or the country/world, as a whole.