Yet another Hacker News

CIA World Facebook Is Dead – Here Is an Attempt at Recreation

36 points yegortk 3 hours ago 41 comments

k310 2 hours ago | parent

Factbook, please.

oofbey 2 hours ago | parent

What happened to the CIA world factbook? It was great.

serf 2 hours ago | parent

"On February 4, 2026, following the restriction and closure since 2025 of other government-funded information websites, the CIA announced, with no warning and no explanation, that The World Factbook was discontinued."[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

Do we have a credible source tying this to DOGE?

tejtm 2 hours ago | parent

It got spellchecked into the boards

Maybe @dang can fix the autocorecto

mindcrime 2 hours ago | parent

"CIA World Facebook"--> Is that a code name for PRISM or ECHELON or whatever??

MrDrMcCoy 2 hours ago | parent

No, it was a guidebook anyone could use for just about every country. It well predates PRISM, and was well regarded until it was discontinued.

lmz 2 hours ago | parent

That was the factbook

marcelo-earth 1 hour ago | parent

I had to read it twice times. It has always been cited on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.

ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago | parent

Freudian Slip. Everyone knows that Facebook is Five Eyes Book/Mossadbook

klodolph 2 hours ago | parent

It was a literal factbook online. In high school, I remember using it to look up facts like the area or population of different countries.

lostlogin 1 hour ago | parent

I feel a bit twitchy remembering the pain of trying to do the references right for websites back then.

cwnyth 1 hour ago | parent

The title of this submission says "Facebook", not "Factbook". That's what they were referring to.

tty456 1 hour ago | parent

I thought it was a site exposing CIA undercover agents

nomilk 1 hour ago | parent

It's a typo in the HN title which should be corrected. Should be World Factbook; nothing to do with Facebook.

MrDrMcCoy 2 hours ago | parent

Feature request: include the source and date last updated for all information fields.

newman314 2 hours ago | parent

Request for higher contrast please for my old eyes.

decafbad 1 hour ago | parent

Pale-grey on white. There are many websites like this. Why on earth?

darkreader.org helps.

PostOnce 41 minutes ago | parent

This is because Claude made them, and Claude doesn't have eyeballs.

Low effort looks like low effort, even if you have an AI helping.

erikig 2 hours ago | parent

Thank you for including data sources as well as some basic data analysis. The scatter plots are quite helpful in analyzing some demographic assumptions that often arise when discussing economic and social development.

You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)

ulfw 2 hours ago | parent

Last thing I want is another Facebook

walrus01 2 hours ago | parent

You know what else they killed? The SIGAR.mil website (special inspector general for afghan reconstruction), the congressionally chartered oversight/audit entity that had a very well laid out website with chronological ordered list of every document that the SIGAR had ever produced. But no, let's sweep it under the rug.

All of its PDF are still out there in the public domain, just scattered and not well organized in a single set of tabular pages. Here's its final report for an example of what it did.

https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2145129/sigar-final-repor...

silverFork 1 hour ago | parent

Freedom In the world stat and couple of others - boundaries and value don't match; says 1-7 1 is the best but listed value is between 1 and 100

TZubiri 1 hour ago | parent

*Factbook

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

Another take from 8 months ago

https://worldfactbookarchive.org/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114530)

Keyframe 1 hour ago | parent

The internet was so fucking great up until around the time facebook showed up and became overbearing. Starting with an era of 'multimedia' CD-ROMs and first wave of internet, through the second wave of internet around the dotcom era and the third era of "AJAX" it felt really open, accessible, full of everything.

I can't tell for sure what happened around 2005 or so, youtube spawned up as well and it seemed for a while it was going great and then things started dying off, getting walled-in and dying within those walls as well.. I don't know how it happened, maybe as Hemingway put it - two ways. gradually, then suddenly.

Factbook was one such place that carried memories of ye olde past.

Also, CIA FACTbook, not CIA FACEbook, although when you think about it and In-Q-Tel lol.

xnx 1 hour ago | parent

Title does not match page and title says "Facebook" instead of "Factbook".

walrus01 59 minutes ago | parent

CIA World Freudian Slip

nomilk 1 hour ago | parent

For those who aren't aware, the CIA World Factbook was a bit like a modern day atlas with many well-sourced headline statistics about each and every country. Things like it's political structure, religion, economy, population, history etc.

I missed it recently when wanting to compare government revenue and expenditure for several countries. Without it, I didn't bother as I'd have to look figures up manually through each respective country's own budget website, and ensure figures were like-for-like (which they rarely are), and doing this for each country each with its own conventions is prohibitively tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all that miserable distillation work was done for us.

The rationale for defunding was 'why should the US tax-payer fund something that's equally valuable for everyone in the world'. I think that's fair. But I lament its removal and wish the US could rattle the tin so other countries chip in and bring it back.

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

I never found it particularly useful but the CIA World Factbook seemed to have originated with some of the "country orientation guides" that the US DoD used to prepare in printed form for military service members being posted to weird locations. There's historical "Welcome to South Korea!" type documents that make an attempt to orient "never traveled outside of the USA before" type Americans to cultural and regionally specific things in Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc. The CIA World Factbook was just a more structured encylopedia like version of the same.

edit: There was absolutely nothing "CIA" specific or sensitive about it whatsoever, it was basically like if you paid some government employees to attempt a job similar to the mid 1980s era Encylopedia Britannica. Maybe with a bit more emphasis on public statistics like literacy rate, percent of houses with telephones, economic statistics, other basic public stats that governments are known to publish.

somat 33 minutes ago | parent

I always figured the answer was that the information was for the US Taxpayer, and if other countries would like to use it. well, it is not for them, but if they can get access, fine, The effort required to try and keep them out is not worth it.

Sort of the same reason US government works end up in the public domain "This work was funded by the US citizens and as such it is owned by the US citizens(in the public domain), it is too much hassle to try and prevent non-US citizens access so if they can get a copy they are free to use it as well"

I liked the idea of having the intelligence agency maintain a public intelligence encyclopedia for it's citizens. Sort of how the geological survey provides public maps and earthquake alerts.

jakzurr 34 minutes ago | parent

According to the wikipedia article,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook

this is the new open source site:

https://openfactbook.org/

k310 12 minutes ago | parent

The most recently archived (meaning last) one seems to be 2020. 367 MB.

https://archive.org/download/factbook-2020