The CIA Killed the World Factbook ⇥ cia.gov

Bad news from the CIA. I mean, probably not what Senator Ron Wyden was referring to and, on a relative scale for the CIA, this is pretty tame. But, still, disappointing:

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.

Simon Willison:

In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.

The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.

I am just guessing here, but I think the CIA can afford to keep this stuff available online indefinitely. The Internet Archive can and it is not being given tens of billions of dollars annually