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CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook
- SilverElfin 9mo ago[flagged]
- waynesonfire 9mo agoWhat makes you think they can't "keep it going"? They're ceasing the publication, aka, the act of releasing it. From the CIA Factbook History page it writes, > It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.
- regenschutz 9mo agoIt was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be very careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high. I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about. Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
- RajT88 9mo agoYour definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.4% of the total government budget. Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.
- SECProto 9mo ago> NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.04% of the total government budget. I'm sorry, I think you have a math or data error here. The US government budget for 2025 was not $62.5 trillion dollars.
- supjeff 9mo agoyeah, where is the CIA going to find the money to pay a few editors? I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda
- pesus 9mo agoIf it was about the cost of updating it, they wouldn't need to remove the archived versions.
- unethical_ban 9mo ago$100,000,000,000 budget for ICE in a year. Average $400,000,000,000 a year in tax cuts for the wealthy. Those expenditures don't pay for themselves. Gotta cut useful services, medical care for the working class, and devalue the dollar some.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoMore discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
- bigwheels 9mo agoThanks! Expanded: Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026
- macinjosh 9mo agoThe irony of an intelligence agency publishing a "fact book" in the first place is thick.
- quietsegfault 9mo agoWhy?
- regenschutz 9mo agoBecause intelligence agencies generally have a vested interest in spreading subtle propaganda, such as by distorting facts. Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.
- dragonwriter 9mo agoYou are looking at the trees, and missing the forest. The subtle propaganda that the Factbook exists to spread is “the CIA is a neutral and trustworthy gatherer and purveyor of facts”.
- otterley 9mo agoI think that’s a secondary or even tertiary goal. The primary goal is to provide a public service to public and private parties who want to become better informed and to show the American people that their tax dollars are at work and reduce the risk of having their funding get cut.
- dragonwriter 9mo agoThe part before the “and” is the how of the propaganda I described, the part after the “and” is one of the outcomes the propaganda is intended to influence; neither is an alternative to the propaganda function.
- kulahan 9mo ago
- scarecrowbob 9mo agoDamn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C. It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil. It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power. That feels a little horrifying to me.
- supjeff 9mo agoHow much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.
- exe34 9mo agoIt gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.
- simonh 9mo agoWhat were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agoand a demonstrated willingness to use it -- e.g. Venezuela
- direwolf20 9mo agoA number that is soon to approach zero, everyone hopes. It could happen. The world is dedollarizing as a direct consequence of the trade war.
- lvspiff 9mo agoI used the CIA factbook so much in college in the early 2000's when looking at so many things. When researching countries to support and travel to it made sense to vreview it beforehand. Its insane that this as a resource would be taken down.
- strangattractor 9mo agoIt was a great resource for basic facts about countries. Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being useful.
- anigbrowl 9mo agoIt gets cited a lot in immigration litigation as well (eg in asylum arguments) because it's an unimpeachable factual source that the government's lawyers can't reasonably dispute.
- pesus 9mo agoNow that you mention it, I'm pretty convinced this is the reason they took it down. If you can't dispute the facts, get rid of them, I guess.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agothat is almost certainly the point
- Noumenon72 9mo agoAnd that's not necessarily anti-intellectual or in opposition to truth. When "seeing like a state", a government doesn't have a view of most actual facts, like "was this person actually in danger" or "is this person repeating the exact same story as the ten people before them". It only knows facts legitimated by its own systems. When those facts force it to take actions that are harmful and dumb, the government is wise to stop defining those as facts. For example, if the army keeps launching raids that kill civilians because the government can only track progress through body counts, it is not "facts are the enemy" to stop counting the bodies. (Obviously it would be wiser to stop using the counts as the deciding factor, but if the generals have different values than the government, as immigration courts do, then stopping the count is the only way to stop the bleeding.)
- dundarious 9mo agoThere was a website redesign under the Biden administration that lost a lot of important historical information as well. For example, the CIA in-house historian had a book review about the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in the 50s, and the CIA/MI6 role in that coup.
- clintfred 9mo agoFacts are the enemy. I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.
- ericras 9mo ago[flagged]
- milesvp 9mo agoThis drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
- Noaidi 9mo ago> While the parent comment is low quality I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
- milesvp 9mo agoForgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.
- andrewmcwatters 9mo agoYour back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.
- eth0up 9mo agoI'll second here. While not profound, I found myself nodding, involuntarily, in agreement.
- abdelhousni 9mo agoTruth is a danger for the ruling oligarchy.
- ks2048 9mo agoThis is surely just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the CIA at the moment. Senator Ron Wyden just sent a mysterious public letter about concerns about what they are doing. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-letter/ https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...
- mmooss 9mo agoThere's this from 2022, but there are probably many concerns from Wyden: https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-heinrich-europe-565878d7299748551a34af0d3543d769 https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
- axus 9mo agoWhenever there's a mystery, apply the scientific method to investigate it. Form a hypothesis, an experiment or test , then record the results and check if they support. Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources. If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis. Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control. If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.
- tremon 9mo agoThe CIA's primary remit is outside of their own country. If the CIA is turning their focus inward, that's actually good news for the remainder of the civilized world.
- octoberfranklin 9mo ago> apply the scientific method to investigate it. Great where do I find a spare identical copy of the CIA to use as the control group?
- Swoerd 9mo ago[dead]
- nxobject 9mo agoOne consequence: The World Factbook is often used in immigration applications as a "you won't get hassled" source of information about conflicts, involvement with the military, etc. (The same is true about State Department assessments of human rights violations.)
- recursive4 9mo agoCounter-argument: why are my tax dollars replicating Wikipedia?
- rimbo789 9mo agoWhat do you think Wiki is based on?
- deafpolygon 9mo agoWikipedia next? I hope not.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agois wikipedia directly owned by the US Government?
- standeven 9mo agoNo, but neither is Greenland.
- arjie 9mo agoReally don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" / "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in comparison https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/ https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
- offmycloud 9mo agoHow did the word "suddenly" get into the title?
- simonw 9mo agoThat was editorializing by the person who submitted it, I didn't use that language in my post.
- ncgl 9mo agoI agree with you
- ajam1507 9mo agoIs it engagement-bait to say that they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives if they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives?
- usefulposter 9mo agoHa, yep. I recall a similar observation in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251912 What other engagement bait adverbs appear in HN submission titles?
- gunapologist99 9mo agoI know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place. Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm) That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential. It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever. The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral. Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda. During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there. However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
- wan23 9mo agoAlternatively, an intelligence agency might publish what they want you to think they know, or simply what they want you to think.
- linuxhansl 9mo agoWhat is going on? This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
- SketchySeaBeast 9mo agoThis administration doesn't seem to see value in soft power.
- foobarchu 9mo agoAlternatively, they dont like to be fact-checked. One of donalds favorite activities is denying he ever said/did things he is recorded on video as saying/doing.
- direwolf20 9mo agoThe facts are inconvenient. Immigrants were citing them at deportation hearings, and the government couldn't dispute them because they came from the government.
- starkeeper 9mo agoThis is so messed up. This was a great public benefit. We used it in High School, including Model United Nations.
- somalihoaxes 9mo ago[flagged]
- anonymousiam 9mo agoI wonder how much AI scraping traffic the site was getting... I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.
- rldjbpin 9mo agoused it extensively in high school as a more approachable way to learn about countries without the daunting amounts that wikipedia pages tend to have. come to realise down the line the "writer's biases" in the latter half of the articles. almost comical to see how nuanced situations are distilled down to "our perspective". recall how you could "learn" about the drug trade situation in almost any country, regardless of how you perceived the country's safeness before reading the page.
- ReallyOldLurker 9mo agoFor now, you can get a copy at https://archive.org/details/CIA-World-Factbook-collection https://archive.org/details/CIA-World-Factbook-collection