I concur.

Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.

This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.

Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.

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oxfeed65261 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems to be archived on the wayback machine, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20260203163430/https://www.cia.g...

It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.

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simonw an hour ago | parent [-]

As far as I can tell the single zip downloadable versions stopped being published after 2020. I grabbed a copy of the 2020 zip from the Internet Archive and turned it into a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/

	▲	EarlKing 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...

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rbanffy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.

That’s a sound idea.

	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If enough people FOIA them maybe they'll decide it's cheaper to just put the archived website back up!
	▲	toomuchtodo 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		https://www.muckrock.com/

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shevy-java 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed. Though perhaps they will open source some stuff. What would interest me is HOW they got the information they showed.

	▲	simonw an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was all released into the public domain already. If you can obtain a copy it's yours to do what you like with.
	▲	anigbrowl 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Every country puts out an official gazette with abundant regulatory and statistical information. Of course you'd be foolish to rely on all these at face value, but it's an excellent starting point for assessing the economic activity of any given country. You can then synthesize it with things like market data and publicly available shipping information. Plus the CIA has (at least I hope it still has) a large staff of people whose only job is to study print, broadcast, and electronic media about other countries and compile that into regular reports of What Goes On There. Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s