10 ms·
CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
- loloquwowndueo 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 Discussed a few days ago as well
- afavour 7mo agoFeels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
- adammarples 7mo agoWhat is this soft power and what can the US do with it?
- afavour 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoI believe Trump has asked that exact question. But also asked how much it costs and whether it can be privatized.
- LPisGood 7mo agoShape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be strong primarily.
- jonstewart 7mo agoMake the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of facilitating gentle commerce?
- biofox 7mo agoDid you forget the /s? Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
- mikemarsh 7mo agoSome people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that. Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- kergonath 7mo agoHaving friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minutes. Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
- vdqtp3 7mo ago> build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?
- cfmcdonald 7mo agoI think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
- kergonath 7mo agoAmong the countries that host US bases, how many had to accept it under the threat of force, invasion, or occupation? I would guess Japan and Germany (initially). Look at the map here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_bases_2.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_bases_2.png . Brute force was not a facto in the vast majority of them.
- PlatoIsADisease 7mo agoI remember this from literally 20 years ago. Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost? And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
- potatototoo99 7mo agoYou can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is positive or negative.
- PlatoIsADisease 7mo agoInteresting. I read about this. "Concealment and spinning" are two ways to not lie.
- wongarsu 7mo agoAlso choosing which methodology is the "right" one to measure a specific number. There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
- woodruffw 7mo ago“Soft power” refers usually to credibility. The point of the Factbook is to be a credible public resource for an entity that would otherwise not have much.
- PlatoIsADisease 7mo agoIn International Relations, my #1 or #2 hobby, credibility does not refer to soft power. (my number 1 hobby is philosophy)
- jfyi 7mo ago
- some_random 7mo agoAre we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
- Retric 7mo agoSoft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception. The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
- CGMthrowaway 7mo agoWe have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.
- Retric 7mo agoHollywood and spy movies/series predate the web. What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.
- 0sdi 7mo agoAmericans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.
- CGMthrowaway 7mo agoI had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation. [1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-Globe-with-Smart-Pen-Educational-Globe-for-Children-with-Interactive-Maps-9/209185759?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=101555868 https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...
- TiredOfLife 7mo agoOne of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power
- jfyi 7mo agoI agree, well mostly. The administration is dispensing with the institutions of soft power. I don't think it's the main goal so much as a consequence of their worldview. Soft power is essentially worthless to people who have no interest in maintaining a facade of international cooperation.
- zackmorris 7mo agoOr maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan writes: "President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next," https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-heading-into-a-dictatorship https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...
- chuckadams 7mo ago> Wait until they start paying for what comes next They'll just blame liberals and double down on the authoritarianism as they've always done.
- Isamu 7mo agoThe Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest. This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
- alex1138 7mo agoCan we please, please not outsource everything to Wikipedia? Many of the editors there are hardly impartial
- hk__2 7mo agoAnd the CIA is impartial? ;)
- alex1138 7mo agoDo please take note of the fact that I did not include "We should trust the CIA" in my comment
- hk__2 7mo agoNo, but you seemed to imply there are people that aren’t partial. Wikipedia is designed to approach impartiality even if its editors are people like you and me who are far from impartial. Are there better alternatives out there?
- alex1138 7mo agoWikipedia is incredibly weaponized. I meant what I said
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Antibabelic 7mo ago
- riazrizvi 7mo agoAn outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.
- kshahkshah 7mo agoChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.
- serf 7mo agoa primary source is not inherently the accurate one, and collab tools like wikipedia allow for more sources -- this makes the difference. yeah it's game-able, and a bad actor can ruin work, but we're comparing it to a literal singular gospel source of information from a three letter agency. p.s. I noticed I used an em dash, appropriately or not. i'm leaving it in. I like it. maybe im turning bot. changing the way I speak/type to avoid being taken that way irks me to hell.
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoIsn't it essentially a source for both of those things? If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
- rileymat2 7mo agoIt aggregates many public sources, so much of it is findable, but not all.
- input_sh 7mo agoThat's the idea, yes. Kill all primary sources, wound all secondary sources (examples: WaPo or "Grokipedia"), convince everyone that they should use this tertiary source whose full control is in the hands of a very few. It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
- SanjayMehta 7mo ago
- kleiba 7mo agoObviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
- stinkbeetle 7mo agoTruly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.
- khat 7mo agoThe CIA was formed in 1947 and the first known controversy was in 1953. And has a whole list of controversies since then. From giving citizens LSD, wiretapping citizens, to supporting Central American cocaine distribution. And this is where you draw the line on trustworthiness? Lol
- MisterTea 7mo agoThat was a joke that violently wooshed over your head. You might need to see a doctor to check for whiplash.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoYou and sarcasm should get better acquainted.
- DetroitThrow 7mo agoWe have to draw the line somewhere
- butlike 7mo agoCIA-distributed LSD would be a weird trip
- vjvjvjvjghv 7mo agoI would love to get some of that.
- 7mo ago
- regenschutz 7mo agoUnfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
- icf80 7mo ago"Facebook" :)
- mrbluecoat 7mo agoI initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D
- mikemarsh 7mo agoSurely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
- regenschutz 7mo agoOh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were
- ekianjo 7mo ago> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
- jonstewart 7mo agoODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.
- dariosalvi78 7mo agoin a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion
- rented_mule 7mo ago20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words. If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nanna 7mo agoBit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
- vlovich123 7mo ago> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working
- Noumenon72 7mo agoSo the factbook is an actual book too? That's what I missed, I thought it was a webpage so this was referring to some other post.
- dylan604 7mo agoThe CIA Factbook being publicy available since 1971 has existed longer than the internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
- bilekas 7mo agoThis is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
- steviedotboston 7mo agoSince the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
- simonw 7mo agoI have that up and running now for the 2020 edition: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 - repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/ https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/ That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoThere I go, hoarding data again. Thanks, stranger.
- GJim 7mo ago> it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.
- steviedotboston 7mo agoI'm not suggesting continued changes, but just preservation.
- tw04 7mo agoA shared knowledge of factual information is the enemy of a fascist state. Not that that has anything to do with the current administration deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served countless people for 80 years.
- toss1 7mo agoFacts always create problems for authoritarian regimes. So they do everything they can do get rid of facts. The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated. This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoThis regime is just following the same path openly. Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
- rootlocus 7mo agoTruthSocial is the largest distributor of propaganda and fake news. That's pretty hypocritic.
- jimt1234 7mo agoNot sure I understand this comment. Trump deserves points for being transparent about his disdain for liberal democratic values? Not sure that's a flex. Hmmm.
- SanjayMehta 7mo ago[flagged]
- nostrademons 7mo agoThe Internet Archive has a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
- thayne 7mo agoPart of the value of the factbook is that it is kept up to date. If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet Archive will become out of date.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
- pseudalopex 7mo agoYour comment was more duplicative than the article.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899292
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoAnd yet here we are
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pron 7mo agoMy theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the world as simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say. To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship and study, which invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoWhat took so long? They've had Wikipedia for years already.
- calibas 7mo agoWhere do you think Wikipedia gets its information? The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on Wikipedia.
- farceSpherule 7mo ago[dead]
- aw124 7mo agoIt's time to sunset the CIA. “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
- constantius 7mo agoIt seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient. As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published. That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many. It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.
- throw263586 7mo ago[dead]
- constantius 7mo agoI'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those reading along: The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths from direct military action are counted. In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths are a minority of all deaths. Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an underestimate), it's difficult to think that for every 4 people killed in this slaughter, only 1 person died of hunger, disease, chronic illness, childbirth, age, etc., etc., etc. Over 2 years.
- throw263586 7mo ago
- Havoc 7mo agoOf all the organisations you’d think the CIA would understand the value of soft power and having some level of control of facts being published
- krunck 7mo agoThey do. Their "publishing" of their "facts" happen all on social media now.
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago++1 at least them, yes
- bobbylarrybobby 7mo agoThey do understand, that's why they're doing this. This is a fundamentally anti-fact administration — when facts aren't known, you can fabricate reality for the masses, which is what they want.
- mangodrunk 7mo agoYou’re replying to someone who is suggesting that the CIA can manipulate the facts and fabricating reality.
- dmschulman 7mo agoIt's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentionally cede US soft power. To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
- danny_codes 7mo agoFox News figure-head cabinet might not be the most, ah, strategically minded group of people.
- thisisauserid 7mo agoThat sucks. It was the first thing I would check when someone said, "Hey, do you want to go to São Paulo/Oman/Laos?" What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
- Stevvo 7mo agoAdvisories on https://travel.state.gov/ https://travel.state.gov/
- probably_wrong 7mo ago> What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?" "The C Programming Language"? Less tongue-in-cheek: I'm sure your embassy issues travel advisories.
- low_common 7mo agoNo link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
- sharkjacobs 7mo agoNo, the World Factbook has been totally taken down. If you try to go to a page, e.g. the entry for Canada[1] it redirects to the statement[2] which the article does cite. That's all that's left online of it, there's nothing else to link to [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/canada/ [2] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/
- elzbardico 7mo agoI really wish more people funded Britannica or some other traditional encyclopedia. Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
- crumpled 7mo agoWikipedia is Creative Commons. Someone could conceivably publish a dead tree version that goes through an editor / editorial process. Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts. Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great deal of discussion. What else are you looking for with "traditional editorial structures"? Consistency in quality and completeness, which Wikipedia lacks. However, whenever an article has lower standards, Wikipedia is happy to point that out to the reader, and allow further refinement. A more traditional encyclopedia would simply omit the article entirely. I'm not really seeing what a traditional editorial structure would be gaining anyone, seems like it would just be a smaller encyclopedia.
- elzbardico 7mo agoTrusting domain experts is precisely what I like in Britannica. I want an environment where real domain experts are not drowned by a mob of midwits.
- crumpled 7mo agoArguably, you get more and better domain experts in Wikipedia. I have a set of Britannicas, it's severely lacking in citations and definitely out of date, no matter how new. The question of article quality has been studied from the very beginning. Wikipedia almost always wins.
- wigster 7mo agofacts? where we're going, we don't need "facts"
- josefritzishere 7mo agoI cannot escape the overall impression that Trump is bankrupting America and we increasingly cannot afford to provide even the most basic of government services.
- mannanj 7mo agoI don't understand why they created or obtained control of the world Factbook in the first place, anyone have a story around this? I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend legitimacy to their organization.
- sharkjacobs 7mo ago> on July 26, CIA was officially born. Just a few months later, on October 1, CIA assumed all responsibility for the JANIS basic intelligence program. Shortly thereafter, JANIS was renamed the National Intelligence Survey (NIS), but continued along the same tradition, providing policymakers and military leaders with up-to-date data, maps, and other reference materials. > In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic studies as CIA’s publication of basic intelligence. It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factbook/ https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factb...
- mannanj 7mo agoThank you!
- dougb5 7mo agoNot to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)
- systems_glitch 7mo agoEnd of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.
- elif 7mo ago“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted.” George Orwell (1984)
- emeril 7mo agoTrump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a natural replacement
- sharyphil 7mo agoThe only useful thing CIA ever did is gone. :(
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- password4321 7mo ago3rd discussion, simultaneously on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808
- gspetr 7mo agoThe end of an era, but ultimately it's not that surprising. In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data. Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result. [0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/ This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant. As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"
- pablowegw 7mo agoThankfully, ATM 'The CIA World Factbook 2024-2025' and earlier versions available on Annas-Archive.