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.
As far as I can tell the single zip downloadable versions stopped being published after 2020. I grabbed a copy of the 2020 zip from the Internet Archive and turned it into a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame.
Every country puts out an official gazette with abundant regulatory and statistical information. Of course you'd be foolish to rely on all these at face value, but it's an excellent starting point for assessing the economic activity of any given country. You can then synthesize it with things like market data and publicly available shipping information. Plus the CIA has (at least I hope it still has) a large staff of people whose only job is to study print, broadcast, and electronic media about other countries and compile that into regular reports of What Goes On There.
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
Metafilter has a theory: "Apparently the judge in the Haitian TPS case cited the Factbook in her injunction ruling. There's quite a bit of speculation that that's why it's gone now."
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.
It starts with framing the CIA as a neutral entity, which it is not. It's a form of metapropaganda, in which a propaganda outlet characterizes itself as a neutral provider of information.
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".
> you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships,
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
Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation, as well as its isolation. Yep, that's a classic trick with State Department propaganda. There are never any huge whoppers, instead the lies they tell are through omission and the subtle shifting of blame ("If Venezuela didn't want to be bombed, they should have given us their oil", etc) in order to craft a narrative that's incongruent with reality.
>Blaming DPRK's "economic mismanagement" while making no mention of the Western sanctions on DPRK which are the cause of its catastrophic economic and humanitarian situation
The catastrophic humanitarian situation IS the cause for the sanctions.
Obvious propaganda plays a role in the destruction of a shared objective reality, which is part of the authoritarian playbook. Subtle propaganda distorts reality but preserves the notion of a shared objective one and does not intend to undermine trust.
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.
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.
Yes, I was surprised by the overwhelming consensus here that the CIA, which is responsible for knowing what's true about other countries, doesn't do any validation of the claims they make about other countries.
The CIA was a secondary source. This bulk of this material is all drawn from other publications. Which you can now access in ways you could not before.
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.
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.
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.