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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Even more than that, anything to keep people out will also block some legitimate users.

There's also some propaganda power in maintaining a widely-cited encyclopedia (and maybe a psyops angle).

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.

> I think that's fair.

Terminating it for US citizens as well so no-one else can have it? That's more like small.

I don't think the rationale makes sense. If you want to provide a free resource why not just provide it for free for everyone, considering it doesn't even cost anything because downloads/online lookups are not a limited resource. Not everything has to be in "competition" with other countries. The whole mindset that if it doesn't give enough of an advantage to one countries people over everyone else means it shouldn't be done at all is very weird.

The CIA most certainly has this information already. Surely making that info in to a basic web page isn't going to cost more than a couple of thousand per year?

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