The CIA and its predecessors have published some version of the World Factbook since 1943! However, according to a statement last week from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the historic and world-renowned publication World Factbook has been terminated and all previous versions have been removed from the CIA site. The CIA did not provide any reason for this abruptly unannounced step, only stating lamely: “We hope you will remain curious about the world and find ways to discover it – on the ground or virtually.”
The impact of the publication has long been worldwide as this article about the abrupt shutdown from the German Media Conglomerate Heise attests. More context about the news can be had at the Data Rescue Project blog And in true DRP fashion, the guest blogger Chris Marcum notes “To that end, I purchased the domain worldfactbook.us and will hand it over to anyone interested in funding, developing, and maintaining an open-source full-stack restoration of the World Factbook.” Marcum also notes that there are various ways to access archived copies of the Factbook:
There are a few options to access archived versions of the site. Developer Simon Willison created both a GitHub repository and a browseable live version of the 2020 archive of the site (that was the last year the CIA provided full zip archives). The Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine has taken over 28,000 snapshots of the World Factbook since January 20th, 2017.
To find out more about the history of the World Factbook, check out the CIA’s own “History of the World Factbook” (NOTE: this is the archived link to the CIA site because it can no longer be assumed that the federal government will keep websites live for the long-term! I highly recommend that everyone who wants to link to any .gov site for any reason should use Internet Archive’s SavePageNow tool to instantly archive the needed information!!)
One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe. Let’s take a quick look into the history of The World Factbook.
Over many decades, The World Factbook evolved from a classified to unclassified, hardcopy to electronic product that added new categories, and even new global entities. The original classified publication, titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, launched in 1962. The first unclassified companion version was issued in 1971. A decade later it was renamed The World Factbook. In 1997, The World Factbook went digital and debuted to a worldwide audience on CIA.gov, where it garnered millions of views each year.
The World Factbook appealed to researchers, news organizations, teachers, students, and international travelers. Some readers even inquired whether their preferred geographic designation or world entity could be included on the high-profile site.
Finally, only CIA insiders would know that officers donated some of their personal travel photos to The World Factbook, which hosted more than 5,000 photographs that were copyright-free for anyone to access and use.
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
There have been 2 other World Factbook sites that have popped up recently. While we applaud the reuse of public domain govt information for non-commercial purposes of greater access to information, we do not endorse either one. We simply are sharing these other additional avenues to accessing this important resource.
1) OpenFactbook.org. As their About page says, this site is built and maintained by Phillip Paik, an independent developer and is a non-commercial project (though they do prominently ask for donations).
2) CIA World Factbook Archive. Their about page states that it is built by GitHub user MilkMp, a “research analyst with training in information organization, archival methodology, intelligence analysis standards, and historical research methods. This project combines all four disciplines—library science to structure a government publication, historical methods for 36 years of format changes, ICD 203/208 standards for data presentation, and crime/intelligence analysis for the analytic tools.”