I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote. It being shutdown is more evidence of how broken the American political system is rather than an indication of the will of the people.

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Yes, those were not included in the zip file.

It would be cool if you did make a torrent of it

The Anguilla summary has 2020 population data, but some of the data is indeed much older:

https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/attachments...

"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

I suspect that may literally be true. 127% of 0 is 0.

You were by accident more factual than the administration can be deliberately.

You say this, but the opposite is equally true. Why should I trust the CIA's website when it says that there are no penguins in Greenland, and so there's no ecological harm to strip mining the place?

It seems to be archived on the wayback machine, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20260203163430/https://www.cia.g...

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.

> Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.

That’s a sound idea.

Agreed. Though perhaps they will open source some stuff. What would interest me is HOW they got the information they showed.

> Facts are not a thing the government is interested in now

They’re not too keen on the world either. Or books.

in particular, these are facts that are officially released by an organ of the US Government responsible for accurate information.

these details are useful for things like immigration and asylum cases, and other complaints that involve the FedGov.

Nor is soft power.

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.

The World Factbook was a really useful resource on the internet.

The existence of secondary sources doesn't reduce the need for primary sources. Before something can be published everywhere, it has to be published somewhere.

This is an odd thing to say for something heavily used on the internet. It was not just a physical book.

Has it though? Isn't one of the concerns of information on the internet (regardless of political affiliation) that a lot of it is total bullshit?

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.

Wikipedia used it. And it had much information not in Wikipedia. And it was concise. And its structure was consistent.

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> This quote, often phrased as "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," is widely attributed to William J. Casey, who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (CIA) under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987.

> 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?

Well - the easier take-away is that the general public can not trust any of those top organisations. I think when a citizen can not trust the government anymore (in any country, at the least in a democracy), this is worrying. It's then more like the novel 1984 - while that referred primarily to the Soviet Union (Big Brother referred to Stalin for the most part), one could also find so many correlations to a "strong man"-led democracy too.

There Is No Disinformation Department.

irrelevant. thy cite the CIA fact book because it expect, not because its the only source. they’ll just start citing something else like the country’s official stats, or the UN, or something else

There's also World Bank population data (but it seems only to go up to 2016): https://databank.worldbank.org/source/subnational-population...

I played a bunch of that too, was that a cited source for it? Don’t remember. I do recall that the very-early-90s geopolitics simulation game Shadow President contained large portions of the fact book in its in-game information system (with citations, which is my first recollection of ever knowing of the thing by name)

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)

Given how all that vanished once Trump won, the propaganda having served its purpose, it seems my decision to write it off as chaff was vindicated.

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)

Yes, apart from the loss of the publication as a historical artifact, it is the loss of the continuing process that kept it up to date as a representation of the present (with whatever flaws you always have with such representations).

Hopefully the next admin will regain an understanding of the value of the World Facebook collection of somewhat-vetted facts and opinions.

...I do?

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.