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at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.
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)
If you don’t realize now that you were lied to even though it’s trivial to confirm now that all the institutions that lied to you have since quietly issued retractions, corrections, or since wrote that they were misled…
Russia had 0 involvement. The laptop and all the controversial material and evidence of corruption on it were legitimate. Wanting to believe otherwise is doing yourself a disservice, even if it means conceding that those you disagree with aren’t always lying.
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
(Elon Musk was the only contributor to a PAC that claimed to represent a deceased Supreme Court Justice.)
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.
