[HN Gopher] CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of T...
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CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World
Factbook
Author : ck2
Score : 290 points
Date : 2026-02-05 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
| bigwheels wrote:
| Thanks! Expanded:
|
| _Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments,
| Feb 2026
| macinjosh wrote:
| The irony of an intelligence agency publishing a "fact book" in
| the first place is thick.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| Why?
| regenschutz wrote:
| Because intelligence agencies generally have a vested
| interest in spreading subtle propaganda, such as by
| distorting facts.
|
| Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the
| World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I
| also don't browse the Factbook too often.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| You are looking at the trees, and missing the forest. The
| subtle propaganda that the Factbook exists to spread is
| "the CIA is a neutral and trustworthy gatherer and purveyor
| of facts".
| otterley wrote:
| I think that's a secondary or even tertiary goal. The
| primary goal is to provide a public service to public and
| private parties who want to become better informed and to
| show the American people that their tax dollars are at
| work and reduce the risk of having their funding get cut.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The part before the "and" is the how of the propaganda I
| described, the part after the "and" is one of the
| outcomes the propaganda is intended to influence; neither
| is an alternative to the propaganda function.
| kulahan wrote:
| I think the problem is people are acting like propaganda
| is inherently bad, so this subconsciously comes across as
| "the CIA is problematic because they have a source of
| factlettes for people to peruse".
| bluGill wrote:
| They have multiple competing interests. One of their
| interests is telling the truth to their local military and
| politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the
| worst that could happen to them.
|
| The world factbook was mostly things that the military or
| politicians might care about the truth of, and data they
| need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there
| wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value
| that might have is outweighed by you can fact check
| everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be
| caught.
|
| Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I
| would expect they would see distorting facts help them.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > One of their interests is telling the truth to their
| local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie
| to their side is the worst that could happen to them.
|
| It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens
| fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting
| audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA.
| ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last
| actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in
| the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work
| around 1962.
| bluGill wrote:
| The worst that can happen is congress gets interested in
| a way that cuts their budget. An audit is one potential
| step on that path.
| notahacker wrote:
| I remember a few amusing examples which weren't strictly
| inaccurate but were pretty blatant official lines, like how
| the US uniquely got to stress a " _strong democratic
| tradition_ " as its political system, whereas everywhere
| else in the Western world was just "parliamentary
| democracy" or "constitutional monarchy" and at least the
| Cold War era versions had a "Communists" line item which
| purported to identify how few people in democratic
| societies were members of Communist parties...
| stochtastic wrote:
| Why? It's an excellent recruiting tool. I used to read it as a
| kid (along with every other paper or digital encyclopedia I
| could get my hands on), and it certainly made me interested in
| the CIA.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive
| thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the
| more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception
| in the mid 20th C.
|
| It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-
| power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow
| committed to being less evil.
|
| It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the
| application simple hard power.
|
| That feels a little horrifying to me.
| supjeff wrote:
| How much do we believe the current administration values
| "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy.
| as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only
| authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims
| and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.
| exe34 wrote:
| It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and
| a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military
| budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to
| the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing,
| but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most
| powerful military in history.
| simonh wrote:
| What were getting is another Russia with the full military
| and economic might of the US.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| and a demonstrated willingness to use it -- e.g.
| Venezuela
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals
| and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the
| military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a
| threat to the rest of the world.
|
| I realize this is kind of a joke, but...
|
| The US will continue to be the most powerful military in
| history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent
| top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom
| and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.
|
| Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to
| put much of a dent in our current military spending (which
| they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars
| in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a
| problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to
| the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...
|
| On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid
| burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone
| else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-
| WW II world order.
|
| On the current Trump path the world is going to get far
| more dangerous and chaotic, not less.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How much do we believe the current administration values
| "intelligence"?_
|
| Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen
| Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n'
| Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our
| carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed
| flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
| esseph wrote:
| > Donald Trump is wickedly smart
|
| This is the exact opposite of what has been said about
| Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > Donald Trump is wickedly smart.
|
| wut. this is a joke, right?
|
| Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless,
| and willing to utilize any and all tools.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wut. this is a joke, right?_
|
| No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are
| well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with
| strategists.
|
| I'm not sure he's wickedly _intelligent_. And he 's
| getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory.
| But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates),
| retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things
| which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope
| he's sometimes characterised as.
| adventured wrote:
| The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization
| by the left, they always target intelligence first no
| matter what.
|
| Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a
| dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was
| a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
|
| The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they
| start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on
| that.
|
| How likely is it that all of those people are actually
| stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance.
| They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the
| typical voter, above average intelligence across the
| board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes
| imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game
| though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is
| stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
| amalcon wrote:
| I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or
| McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone
| like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly,
| dude was _wrong_ and /or _lying_ about a lot of stuff but
| he wasn 't dumb), and Trump, sure.
|
| The thing those people have in common is that they have
| unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's
| kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of
| performative bombast, specific tropes referencing
| cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's
| mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put
| myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can
| be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as
| buffoonish.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could
| be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't
| understand why those norms are in place.
|
| I think you're both correct to note that attacking the
| intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty
| normal liberal tactic.
|
| At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from
| hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps
| "intelligence":
|
| he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't
| functionally matter how smart he is because he has so
| much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't
| -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is
| probably way more effective than worrying about the long
| games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes
| that fact obvious.
|
| In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power
| could also be stated as a worry that the folks running
| the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety
| or mask on their power because they are more comfortable
| using dumb, brute force.
|
| And they might be correct in that assessment- they might
| not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
|
| Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus
| 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in
| Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Bill Clinton who got caught in a sex scandal... smart?
| 9x39 wrote:
| And Noam Chomsky was deeply connected to JE and his
| island, which is a significantly larger scandal.
|
| The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say,
| lust or many other trappings of power.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| I'm firmly on the right, but W Bush and Sarah Palin were
| absolutely bumbling dopes.
|
| Dan Quayle hitching his wagon to the moral majority and
| inadvertently setting the stage for the neocon right?
| Maybe not a completely bumbling dope, but absolutely a
| dope.
|
| The right had 20-30 years of ineffectual dopes that
| completely lost touch with the American people.
|
| Trump is not a dope. You don't win a first and second
| presidency, with the entire media and political apparatus
| aligned against you to a degree unprecedented in modern
| politics, by being a dope.
| AngryData wrote:
| What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering
| idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports
| from people who knew him personally had very low regard for
| his intellegence, and that is even before taking into
| account his repeated public blunders.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy.
| He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense
| of the term.
|
| It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side
| of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it
| down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim
| you're excelling at your goals because you just have a
| sociopathic approach to the world.
|
| Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he
| has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro
| Regime".
|
| Yeah, that -screams- competence.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What makes you think h is smart instead of a
| blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life?_
|
| The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred
| himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice.
| I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind
| up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent.
| You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican
| field in 2016. You _do_ need to be crafty.)
| stonogo wrote:
| ah yes, a wickedly smart man who appoints an idiot as
| secretary of defense. completely consistent analysis here
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| People--especially the squares in this business--tend to
| mistake his unfamiliar blue-collar New Yorker manner of
| speech at face value and don't bother to look deeper.
| notahacker wrote:
| Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging
| about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings
| continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps
| that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where
| there _isn 't_ any strategic value to dissembling or
| being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's
| supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude
| the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are,
| of course, smart and well connected people that _want_
| someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of
| attention occupying the centre of attention.
| mynameisash wrote:
| > Donald Trump is wickedly smart.
|
| I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of
| cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly _not_
| a term I would ever apply to him, and I 'm not sure how
| anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts
| otherwise.
| protocolture wrote:
| Donald Trump is cunning, but you wouldn't make a Fox
| president either, it would just screech and shit all over
| the oval office too.
| learingsci wrote:
| One can view the defensive realist perspective as another
| application of the 80/20 rule. It's all economics. Debt
| determines many outcomes.
| epsilonic wrote:
| We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right".
| The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for
| surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power"
| you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet
| for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect
| things to get uglier and stranger as well.
| exe34 wrote:
| Project Insight. Hydra was growing inside S.H.I.E.L.D the
| entire time!
| Revolution1120 wrote:
| Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of
| "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote
| Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is
| far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is
| merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's _On the Origin of
| Species_ didn 't analyze the patterns of extinction.The
| evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself
| are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational
| enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to
| use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to
| eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their
| own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will
| happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights.
| Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might
| makes right" is rife with literary folly.
| epsilonic wrote:
| Book 1 of Plato: Republic demonstrates the folly of such
| thinking.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb
| postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try
| and flip me :D
|
| But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big
| levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing;
| I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault
| readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident
| views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will
| show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown
| folks to kidnap.
| epsilonic wrote:
| They will have machines do that for them, curating
| collections of dissident files that are categorized by
| various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft
| to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick
| in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE);
| it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it,
| your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt
| to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e.,
| the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and
| are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to
| commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening.
| What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale.
| goda90 wrote:
| > It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as
| the application simple hard power.
|
| Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's
| incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power,
| I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others
| can fill the vacuum.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as
| the application simple hard power.
|
| They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive
| soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of
| oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either
| really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) _building_
| anything. I don 't think this period of brutal oppression
| they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in
| the US react _very poorly_ to roving bands of State goons.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| this isn't 1820 -- most people's perception is via social
| media, and failing that, legacy media.
|
| which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated
| money to Trump; "kiss the ring".
|
| it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
|
| recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still,
| in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after
| everything that has happened.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| You're talking about that effective soft power, yes. There
| are some smarter authoritarians still maintaining it, but
| when things get overt it loses a lot of efficacy. We've
| swung from 1/2 to 1/3 support for Republicans, despite most
| people going about their lives more-or-less normally
| outside of one small city. So that swing is attributed to a
| failure of soft power. Check out opinions _in_ Minneapolis
| to see what _application_ of hard power looks like.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| > it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
|
| I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix
| doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up
| for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants
| the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS,
| it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the
| network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with
| a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
| iwontberude wrote:
| It's the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that
| scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming
| up with decentralized systems that work rather than the
| mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along
| collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way
| forward for us.
| Revolution1120 wrote:
| Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug
| problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland
| Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't
| the DEA be shut down?
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries
| might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker
| table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power
| method as well. (OTOH, to your point: _how_ you describe other
| countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is
| well taken in that respect.)
| lvspiff wrote:
| I used the CIA factbook so much in college in the early 2000's
| when looking at so many things. When researching countries to
| support and travel to it made sense to vreview it beforehand. Its
| insane that this as a resource would be taken down.
| strangattractor wrote:
| It was a great resource for basic facts about countries.
| Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being
| useful.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It gets cited a lot in immigration litigation as well (eg in
| asylum arguments) because it's an unimpeachable factual source
| that the government's lawyers can't reasonably dispute.
| pesus wrote:
| Now that you mention it, I'm pretty convinced this is the
| reason they took it down. If you can't dispute the facts, get
| rid of them, I guess.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| that is almost certainly the point
| phyzome wrote:
| I was in middle school in the 90s and I had that URL memorized.
| Used it a lot as a reference for class projects.
| dundarious wrote:
| There was a website redesign under the Biden administration that
| lost a lot of important historical information as well. For
| example, the CIA in-house historian had a book review about the
| overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in the 50s, and the
| CIA/MI6 role in that coup.
| clintfred wrote:
| Facts are the enemy.
|
| I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen
| thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that."
| Oof.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| > If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping
| on a human face, forever.
|
| I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this
| human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good
| contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
| dizlexic wrote:
| I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step
| toward dystopia... 10/10
|
| It could be as simple as budget changes.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is
| so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and
| government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the
| government holds true
| dizlexic wrote:
| source or evidence of this?
| antiframe wrote:
| I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy"
| stance is a step towards dystopia.
|
| I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use
| to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US
| would produce 84% _more_ energy than it currently produces
| (from _all_ sources) [1]. Of course that 's a huge
| undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because
| pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy
| counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't
| have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved
| problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn
| best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
| deepsun wrote:
| Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels's former personal secretary,
| said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we
| didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most
| civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do
| such things".
| nostrademons wrote:
| FWIW both of these books were written _about_ western
| societies. _1984_ was about Orwell's experience writing
| propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly
| modeled on the U.S. + Britain; "air strip one" is his tongue-
| in-cheek name for the British isles. _Fahrenheit 451_ is based
| on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It's
| explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was
| actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
|
| They not only _could_ happen here, they _did_ happen here. It's
| a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as
| a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized
| documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the
| authors from going to jail.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was
| about propaganda at BBC - nothing.
|
| I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives
| are his notebooks.
|
| Can you describe the basis for the claim?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| ChatGPT says his experience did make him think about
| bureaucracy in organisations leading to untruths but to say
| it's the basis of 1984 is clearly absurd, it's a much more
| complex book than an allegory of propaganda for the BBC.
| protocolture wrote:
| Its definitely an element, but it also mirrors some
| experiences in spain and ripping off Zamyatin's "We".
|
| Like if you take Zamyatin's "We", and make the main
| character a propagandist working for the government, you
| get 1984.
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism
| in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-
| totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all
| about" when it betrayed the anarchists).
|
| Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist
| experiment and the societies it would form. The history
| rewritting was actually a typical socialist society
| pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole
| past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70
| years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from
| taiwan!
|
| Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and
| stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the
| moscow controlled part of the international defending facists
| as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the
| anarchists in the back in spain.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Thank you for inspiring me to look up the sources for the
| literary motifs in 1984.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-
| Four#Sources_f...
|
| A very interesting read, but it did not verify any of your
| claims.
| n1b0m wrote:
| While it's true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic
| absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the
| BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning
| against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a
| centralized, surveilled state.
|
| Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of
| Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to
| expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we
| gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much
| closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts
| of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
| gampleman wrote:
| I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern
| block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
| pohl wrote:
| Huxley was plenty prescient. Soma is basically scrolling
| for dopamine hits and distraction.
| oliyoung wrote:
| BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so,
| than 1984
| boshomi wrote:
| "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
| ears. It was their final, most essential command."
|
| "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
| rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and
| street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.
| And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
| History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present
| in which the Party is always right." -- George Orwell, 1984
| (2026?)
| normalaccess wrote:
| Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite
| the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time
| phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations.
| Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled
| silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to
| extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to
| know but is imposable to know.
| gffrd wrote:
| It's a shame we don't have physical bodies and a means to
| share the human experience with other humans without
| intermediaries.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What's your plan, be present at all major events?
| j-bos wrote:
| I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated
| neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing
| about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces
| that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will
| be able to talk back to!
| niobe wrote:
| Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public
| information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this
| could easily be published by any public institution interested
| in foreign affairs.
| guywithahat wrote:
| But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a
| name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts,
| that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't
| make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and
| I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.
| joriJordan wrote:
| Wild. Growing up through Reagan, I saw the world only act like
| this.
|
| Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well:
| https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc
|
| Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled
| populism.
|
| To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following
| orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via
| narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
|
| Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are
| poor justification for enabling it.
| abdelhousni wrote:
| Truth is a danger for the ruling oligarchy.
| ks2048 wrote:
| This is surely just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in
| the CIA at the moment. Senator Ron Wyden just sent a mysterious
| public letter about concerns about what they are doing.
|
| https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...
| mmooss wrote:
| There's this from 2022, but there are probably many concerns
| from Wyden:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
| axus wrote:
| Whenever there's a mystery, apply the scientific method to
| investigate it. Form a hypothesis, an experiment or test , then
| record the results and check if they support.
|
| Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their
| government sources.
|
| If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't
| proven it but it supports the hypothesis.
|
| Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for
| federal monitoring and control.
|
| If we start seeing more improbably results, that is support for
| the hypothesis.
| tremon wrote:
| The CIA's primary remit is outside of their own country. If
| the CIA is turning their focus inward, that's actually good
| news for the remainder of the civilized world.
| nxobject wrote:
| One consequence: The World Factbook is often used in immigration
| applications as a "you won't get hassled" source of information
| about conflicts, involvement with the military, etc. (The same is
| true about State Department assessments of human rights
| violations.)
| recursive4 wrote:
| Counter-argument: why are my tax dollars replicating Wikipedia?
| rimbo789 wrote:
| What do you think Wiki is based on?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Wikipedia next? I hope not.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| is wikipedia directly owned by the US Government?
| arjie wrote:
| Really don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" /
| "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The
| headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in
| comparison https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
|
| It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here:
| https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
| offmycloud wrote:
| How did the word "suddenly" get into the title?
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| I know this isn't a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss
| it, but I've always thought the World Factbook was a strange
| thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place.
|
| Not because the information is false, but because the act of
| choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you
| accept that, you're no longer talking about neutral data; you're
| talking about the official position of the United States
| government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure
| it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
|
| That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation
| depends on what you don't say as much as what you do. Publicly
| cataloging a country's political structure, demographics, or
| internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate
| discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
|
| It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It
| signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we're
| willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like
| population or religious composition can become leverage or
| liabilities in the wrong context, and you can't realistically
| scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic
| negotiation or whatever.
|
| The core issue is simple: this isn't a private research group or
| a tech company publishing an open dataset; it's literally the
| largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the
| United States government publicly describing other nations. That
| isn't neutral.
|
| Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even
| subconsciously, _objective facts_ become directional. Not by
| falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance
| scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic
| structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind
| of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than
| obvious propaganda.
|
| During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it
| probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the
| current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the
| editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there
| were better avenues to get their message out there.
|
| However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives
| since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something
| else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in
| agreement with the previous administration, which means it might
| have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed
| or (really, it seems) no longer _wanted_ or at least valued by
| either administration.
| wan23 wrote:
| Alternatively, an intelligence agency might publish what they
| want you to think they know, or simply what they want you to
| think.
| wordpad wrote:
| World Factbook is targeting US government itself providing a
| consistent and open view on the topic - a single official
| position on basic facts.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| What is going on?
|
| This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US
| soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them,
| etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| This administration doesn't seem to see value in soft power.
| starkeeper wrote:
| This is so messed up. This was a great public benefit. We used it
| in High School, including Model United Nations.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I wonder how much AI scraping traffic the site was getting...
|
| I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.
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