Overview
The CIA has abruptly discontinued The World Factbook, a comprehensive public intelligence resource that provided country data since 1971, removing all archives and setting up redirects instead of maintaining historical access.
Key Facts
- discontinued after 54 years of operation - a major public intelligence resource is now gone
- removed entire website including all historical archives - decades of public domain research data vanished overnight
- implemented 302 redirects to closure announcement - even archived versions are inaccessible through official channels
- covered 267 world entities with comprehensive country data - researchers and educators lose a primary reference source
- released under public domain since inception - no legal reason to remove rather than archive the content
- Simon Willison preserved 2020 version on GitHub Pages - community effort saves some data from digital destruction
Why It Matters
This represents digital cultural vandalism - the unnecessary destruction of a valuable public resource that could have been archived rather than deleted.