<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/06/the-cia-erased-the-world-factbook-with-no-warning-and-told-everyone-to-stay-curious/>
"For over half a century, the CIA’s
World Factbook has been one of the most
quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A
comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country
in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography,
the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least
some
tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”
And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation.
Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the
Factbook has
“sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.
Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn’t mince words about
what happened:
In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire
site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set
every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.
The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start.
There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at
the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better
than removing all of that valuable content entirely..
That’s exactly right. If the CIA decided they no longer wanted to maintain the
Factbook—fine. You could make an argument for that. But the decision to not
just stop updating it, but to actively
destroy access to it without any
advance notice is something else entirely. You couldn’t even grab a final copy
before it vanished."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
