In the war on data, even the CIA isn't safe

As lots of people have pointed out, when trying to attack the truth, lying is often less effective than eliminating sources of trustworthy information.

Harmeet Kaur writing for CNN:

Taylor Hale was in the middle of teaching a Western geography lesson on Wednesday afternoon when his sixth-grade students informed him that the online reference they usually consulted was gone. He’d instructed them to compare the gross domestic products of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and so they turned to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. But instead of finding the usual index of countries, they hit a blue webpage announcing that the Factbook was no more.

After decades of serving as a reliable, authoritative public repository of basic information about countries, their economies, and their people, The World Factbook disappeared from the internet on February 4 with no advance notice. Teachers, students, librarians, researchers, and curious citizens in general were abruptly cut off from a reference they had taken for granted.

“The CIA Factbook is not bulletproof perfect, but it’s way better than a lot of other sources out there and it’s free,” Hale, a social studies teacher in Oklahoma City, said. “It was always there, and now it’s not.”

Before this week, teachers like Hale routinely directed their students to The World Factbook for school assignments, international travelers used it to assess security risks and vaccine recommendations, and journalists relied on its data to add context to their reporting.

John Devine, the government information research specialist for the Boston Public Library, recalled a patron who was particularly curious about population statistics. Over the years, the city’s librarians found that The World Factbook was “the singular best source for this” — the CIA updated its numbers annually, and no other entity offered data that was as accurate year after year.

“It’s a tough loss,” Devine said. “We’re going to have to find things from other sources. Again, how well can we trust them? How well are we going to be able to get data on developing or even barely developing countries?”

Originally called “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook,” the Factbook began in 1962 as a classified publication for government and military officials. An unclassified version followed in 1971, and in 1975, it became available to the public in print. It was renamed “The World Factbook” in 1981, and in 1997, The World Factbook went digital.

The CIA’s announcement that the Factbook was shutting down came quietly, with no warning and no explanation of the change, and the agency declined to comment on the record for this story. Instead, it posted an obituary of sorts, on a webpage titled “Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell.”

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It also follows the loss of other US government information, once considered relatively reliable and trustworthy. Since President Donald Trump came into office again, he has directed US government health websites to be taken down or modified, imposed his views on what should and shouldn’t be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and ordered the National Parks Service to remove references to slavery, among other directives.

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“It’s so hard to use corporate or private company resources, whether they’re talking about international data or banking or currency exchanges or whatever, because they have a vested interest to lie,” Hale said. “I can go debunk stuff, I can go redact stuff, but I don’t want the kids exposed to the lie in the first place.”

Alexi Lenington, a high school social studies teacher in Texas, likewise lamented the loss of The World Factbook as a central, agreed-upon authority. “It was just raw data, so nobody could accuse me of having an agenda or anything, which is important if you’re teaching in Texas,” he added.

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News organizations are also feeling the loss. Lizzie Jury, director of CNN’s editorial research team, said the research desk recently did away with subscriptions to other databases because similar information was available through the Factbook, which she called “the gold standard for country statistics.” On Thursday, she checked Britannica’s World Data to see if it could serve as an alternative but found that it, too, used The World Factbook as one of its sources.