CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook
simonwillison.net254 points by ck2 7 hours ago
254 points by ck2 7 hours ago
Facts 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.
FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing.
There seem to be no interviews with Orwell, no recordings - what survives are his notebooks.
Can you describe the basis for the claim?
Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!
> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".
Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling for dopamine hits and distraction.
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This 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.
I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards.
Upvote from me :)
> 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.
Forgive 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.
Your back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.
I'll second here. While not profound, I found myself nodding, involuntarily, in agreement.
I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10
It could be as simple as budget changes.
I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
Damn 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.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
this isn't 1820 -- most people's perception is via social media, and failing that, legacy media.
which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring".
it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened.
> it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
You're talking about that effective soft power, yes. There are some smarter authoritarians still maintaining it, but when things get overt it loses a lot of efficacy. We've swung from 1/2 to 1/3 support for Republicans, despite most people going about their lives more-or-less normally outside of one small city. So that swing is attributed to a failure of soft power. Check out opinions in Minneapolis to see what application of hard power looks like.
How 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.
It 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.
What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US.
> It 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.
I realize this is kind of a joke, but...
The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.
Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...
On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.
On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.
> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders.
> What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life?
The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)
That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy. He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense of the term.
It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.
Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".
Yeah, that -screams- competence.
> Donald Trump is wickedly smart.
wut. this is a joke, right?
Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.
> wut. this is a joke, right?
No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.
I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.
The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what.
Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.
How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.
The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.
A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.
I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.
At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":
he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.
In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.
And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
ah yes, a wickedly smart man who appoints an idiot as secretary of defense. completely consistent analysis here
> Donald Trump is wickedly smart
This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.
We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.
But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
One can view the defensive realist perspective as another application of the 80/20 rule. It’s all economics. Debt determines many outcomes.
Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down?
It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us.
"iTs ThE oRaNgE MaN"
Yes, lefties. It's always him.
One 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.)
I 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.
It 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.
Now 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.
I was in middle school in the 90s and I had that URL memorized. Used it a lot as a reference for class projects.
It was a great resource for basic facts about countries. Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being useful.
This 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-le...
Whenever 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.
The 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.
There's this from 2022, but there are probably many concerns from Wyden:
https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
This is so messed up. This was a great public benefit. We used it in High School, including Model United Nations.
What 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.)
Really 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
It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
I 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.
Alternatively, an intelligence agency might publish what they want you to think they know, or simply what they want you to think.
There 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.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
Thanks! Expanded:
Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026
Truth is a danger for the ruling oligarchy.
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It 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.
Your 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.
> 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.
If it was about the cost of updating it, they wouldn't need to remove the archived versions.
yeah, 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
What 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.
$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.
The irony of an intelligence agency publishing a "fact book" in the first place is thick.
Why? It's an excellent recruiting tool. I used to read it as a kid (along with every other paper or digital encyclopedia I could get my hands on), and it certainly made me interested in the CIA.
Why?
Because 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.
You 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”.
I think the problem is people are acting like propaganda is inherently bad, so this subconsciously comes across as “the CIA is problematic because they have a source of factlettes for people to peruse”.
I 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.
The 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.
They have multiple competing interests. One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them.
The world factbook was mostly things that the military or politicians might care about the truth of, and data they need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value that might have is outweighed by you can fact check everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be caught.
Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I would expect they would see distorting facts help them.
> One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them.
It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.
The worst that can happen is congress gets interested in a way that cuts their budget. An audit is one potential step on that path.
Wikipedia next? I hope not.
Counter-argument: why are my tax dollars replicating Wikipedia?