CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

[regenschutz]

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.

[detourdog]

The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.

[hk__2]

At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.

[hackingonempty]

No worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of experts to keep us informed.

[sofixa]

> Wikipedia

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).

It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.

[icf80]

"Facebook" :)

[KellyCriterion]

Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?

[belter]

See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...

[ekianjo]

> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.

[rented_mule]

20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.

If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.

[nereye]

Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various ‘new’ countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia) that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to us.

The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).

[nanna]

Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?

[Havoc]

Of all the organisations you’d think the CIA would understand the value of soft power and having some level of control of facts being published

[dmschulman]

It's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentionally cede US soft power.

To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.

[bobbylarrybobby]

They do understand, that's why they're doing this. This is a fundamentally anti-fact administration — when facts aren't known, you can fabricate reality for the masses, which is what they want.

[krunck]

They do. Their "publishing" of their "facts" happen all on social media now.

[KellyCriterion]

++1

at least them, yes

[nostrademons]

The Internet Archive has a mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...

[thayne]

Part of the value of the factbook is that it is kept up to date.

If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet Archive will become out of date.

[Isamu]

The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest. This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.

[Antibabelic]

Where do you think the information on Wikipedia comes from? Not that Wikipedia strongly relies on The World Factbook, but it can't exist without other secondary sources like these.

[nikanj]

The Factbook dates from a time when facts mattered

[837263292029]

> govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections

That's one way of putting it.

[alex1138]

Can we please, please not outsource everything to Wikipedia? Many of the editors there are hardly impartial

[elzbardico]

I really wish more people funded Britannica or some other traditional encyclopedia.

Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.

[crumpled]

Wikipedia is Creative Commons. Someone could conceivably publish a dead tree version that goes through an editor / editorial process.

Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts.

Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great deal of discussion.

What else are you looking for with "traditional editorial structures"? Consistency in quality and completeness, which Wikipedia lacks. However, whenever an article has lower standards, Wikipedia is happy to point that out to the reader, and allow further refinement. A more traditional encyclopedia would simply omit the article entirely.

I'm not really seeing what a traditional editorial structure would be gaining anyone, seems like it would just be a smaller encyclopedia.

[steviedotboston]

Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.

[simonw]

I have that up and running now for the 2020 edition: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 - repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/

That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.

[GJim]

> it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it

It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.

[loloquwowndueo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794

Discussed a few days ago as well

[thisisauserid]

That sucks. It was the first thing I would check when someone said, "Hey, do you want to go to São Paulo/Oman/Laos?"

What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"

[probably_wrong]

> What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"

"The C Programming Language"?

Less tongue-in-cheek: I'm sure your embassy issues travel advisories.

[Stevvo]

Advisories on https://travel.state.gov/

[gspetr]

The end of an era, but ultimately it's not that surprising.

In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data.

Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result.

[0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/

This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant.

As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"

[dariosalvi78]

in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion

[kleiba]

Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.

[moolcool]

Like Ken Jennings said about this: "you have wonder if the problem was 'world,' 'facts,' or 'books'"

[stronglikedan]

Ironically, most people who think that also think the opposite of the previous administration.

[stinkbeetle]

Truly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.

[elif]

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted.”

George Orwell (1984)

[password4321]

3rd discussion, simultaneously on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794

[pseudalopex]

Your comment was more duplicative than the article.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899292

[pablowegw]

Thankfully, ATM 'The CIA World Factbook 2024-2025' and earlier versions available on Annas-Archive.

[aw124]

It's time to sunset the CIA. “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

[afavour]

Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.

[some_random]

Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.

[zackmorris]

Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes:

"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...

[TiredOfLife]

One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power

[PlatoIsADisease]

I remember this from literally 20 years ago.

Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?

And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.

[adammarples]

What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?

[pron]

My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the world as simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say. To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship and study, which invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.

[mannanj]

I don't understand why they created or obtained control of the world Factbook in the first place, anyone have a story around this?

I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend legitimacy to their organization.

[sharkjacobs]

> on July 26, CIA was officially born. Just a few months later, on October 1, CIA assumed all responsibility for the JANIS basic intelligence program. Shortly thereafter, JANIS was renamed the National Intelligence Survey (NIS), but continued along the same tradition, providing policymakers and military leaders with up-to-date data, maps, and other reference materials.

> In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic studies as CIA’s publication of basic intelligence. It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook.

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factb...

[low_common]

No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.

[sharkjacobs]

No, the World Factbook has been totally taken down. If you try to go to a page, e.g. the entry for Canada[1] it redirects to the statement[2] which the article does cite. That's all that's left online of it, there's nothing else to link to

    [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/canada/
    [2] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

[toss1]

Facts always create problems for authoritarian regimes.

So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.

The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.

This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.

[SanjayMehta]

This regime is just following the same path openly.

Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.

[systems_glitch]

End of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.

[wigster]

facts?

where we're going, we don't need "facts"

[sharyphil]

The only useful thing CIA ever did is gone. :(

[dougb5]

Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)

[tw04]

A shared knowledge of factual information is the enemy of a fascist state.

Not that that has anything to do with the current administration deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served countless people for 80 years.

[josefritzishere]

I cannot escape the overall impression that Trump is bankrupting America and we increasingly cannot afford to provide even the most basic of government services.

[SanjayMehta]

What took so long? They've had Wikipedia for years already.

[calibas]

Where do you think Wikipedia gets its information?

The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on Wikipedia.

[bilekas]

This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.

[emeril]

Trump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a natural replacement

[jonstewart]

ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.

[constantius]

It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.

As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.

That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.

It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.

[riazrizvi]

An outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.

[BLKNSLVR]

Isn't it essentially a source for both of those things?

If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.

[kshahkshah]

ChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.

[rileymat2]

I don’t think this is true, some of the data is not clean and is created through estimates and modeling, I’d not trust ChatGpt to get this right, and adding your own uncited models or estimates to wikipedia will get it deleted.

[VikingCoder]

The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of astroturfing groups.

If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.

Here's one hot take:

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...

[vachina]

LLM’s memory recall is extremely lossy. Facts should not be lossy.

[threethirtytwo]

This is so stupid. Wikipedia needs sources and citations in order to construct articles, and chatgpt needs training data to build it's models. The CIA world fact book sits at the core of training and wikipedia citations. It is the inception point of all these other services you use.