CIA terminates its World Factbook, overthrowing reference regime

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Taylor Hale was in the middle of teaching a Western geography lesson on Wednesday afternoon when his sixth-grade students informed him that the online reference they usually consulted was gone. He’d instructed them to compare the gross domestic products of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and so they turned to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. But instead of finding the usual index of countries, they hit a blue webpage announcing that the Factbook was no more.

After decades of serving as a reliable, authoritative public repository of basic information about countries, their economies, and their people, The World Factbook disappeared from the internet on February 4 with no advance notice. Teachers, students, librarians, researchers, and curious citizens in general were abruptly cut off from a reference they had taken for granted.

“The CIA Factbook is not bulletproof perfect, but it’s way better than a lot of other sources out there and it’s free,” Hale, a social studies teacher in Oklahoma City, said. “It was always there, and now it’s not.”

Before this week, teachers like Hale routinely directed their students to The World Factbook for school assignments, international travelers used it to assess security risks and vaccine recommendations, and journalists relied on its data to add context to their reporting.

John Devine, the government information research specialist for the Boston Public Library, recalled a patron who was particularly curious about population statistics. Over the years, the city’s librarians found that The World Factbook was “the singular best source for this” — the CIA updated its numbers annually, and no other entity offered data that was as accurate year after year.

“It’s a tough loss,” Devine said. “We’re going to have to find things from other sources. Again, how well can we trust them? How well are we going to be able to get data on developing or even barely developing countries?”

Originally called “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook,” the Factbook began in 1962 as a classified publication for government and military officials. An unclassified version followed in 1971, and in 1975, it became available to the public in print. It was renamed “The World Factbook” in 1981, and in 1997, The World Factbook went digital.

The CIA’s announcement that the Factbook was shutting down came quietly, with no warning and no explanation of the change, and the agency declined to comment on the record for this story. Instead, it posted an obituary of sorts, on a webpage titled “Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell.”

“Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it… in person or virtually,” the final line reads.

While the website briefly touches on the reference’s history, the CIA didn’t elaborate on what prompted the decision to cease publication or whether any of the information would be archived on the CIA’s website. Simon Willison, a programmer who works on data journalism, has since downloaded the available data and made it accessible to browse online, though the most recent material is from 2020.

The announcement came on the same day that the Washington Post laid off a third of its newsroom, including much of its international reporting staff.

It also follows the loss of other US government information, once considered relatively reliable and trustworthy. Since President Donald Trump came into office again, he has directed US government health websites to be taken down or modified, imposed his views on what should and shouldn’t be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and ordered the National Parks Service to remove references to slavery, among other directives.

To Hale, it feels connected.

“I consider this the same thing as going after USAID, the same thing as going after the Smithsonian, the same thing as removing the Black soldiers’ names from the internet,” he said. “It’s all the same kind of bullsh*t censorship from Republicans. It just feels like they want to make us a very ignorant country. And I’m not here for that as a teacher.”

The elimination of The World Factbook has left educators and others in the information space scrambling. Hale was able to complete his lesson by pulling up the Internet Archive, but he expects that the loss of the Factbook will make his job more time-consuming. The World Factbook served as a one-stop shop where his students could easily obtain data about a country’s economics, demographics or culture, which he then used to inspire more fruitful discussions. Now, he and his students will have to gather that data piecemeal — and he doesn’t trust the other sources that are out there.

“It’s so hard to use corporate or private company resources, whether they’re talking about international data or banking or currency exchanges or whatever, because they have a vested interest to lie,” Hale said. “I can go debunk stuff, I can go redact stuff, but I don’t want the kids exposed to the lie in the first place.”

Alexi Lenington, a high school social studies teacher in Texas, likewise lamented the loss of The World Factbook as a central, agreed-upon authority. “It was just raw data, so nobody could accuse me of having an agenda or anything, which is important if you’re teaching in Texas,” he added.

Just this week, Lenington and a counselor announced a schoolwide initiative in which groups of students would explore and present information about various cultures. On the first page of the guide he wrote, Lenington said he recommended that students start with The World Factbook. He’s been looking around for other sources since its shutdown, but he said none are as accurate and easy to use.

News organizations are also feeling the loss. Lizzie Jury, director of CNN’s editorial research team, said the research desk recently did away with subscriptions to other databases because similar information was available through the Factbook, which she called “the gold standard for country statistics.” On Thursday, she checked Britannica’s World Data to see if it could serve as an alternative but found that it, too, used The World Factbook as one of its sources.

“It just makes something that was easy to do and quick to find for everyone more difficult,” she said of the Factbook’s elimination.

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