The globe was our concern
Back when telephones had cords and “long distance” was still a thing (late 1970s), this Baby Boomer called the Government Printing Office (GPO) in D.C. trying to buy a detailed CIA world map I’d read about. (I’d previously bought a few hardcover Foreign Service area guides for specific countries from the GPO. The good old days.) The woman on the D.C. end admitted that the GPO did not have the CIA item in its inventory.
“You need to contact GMAODS,” she said casually.
Not fluent in acronym, I asked her to render that in English.
“Government Mapping Agency Office of Distribution Services.”
“Of course,” I thought, figuratively smacking my forehead. (I never obtained the map.)
One of my sisters worked in D.C. as an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld’s personal attorney around that time. She kept a book of government acronyms on her pre-PC desk so she wouldn’t be similarly flummoxed. (Pre-PC meaning pre-personal computer not the other PC.)
David Graham shares a similar reminiscence at The Atlantic:
The CIA World Factbook occupies a special place in the memories of elder Millennials like me. It was an enormous compendium of essential facts about every country around the world, carefully collected from across the federal government. This felt especially precious when the World Factbook went online in 1997 (it had previously been a classified internal publication printed on paper, then a declassified print resource), a time when the internet still felt new and unsettled. Unlike many other pages on the World Wide Web, it was reliable enough that you could even get away with citing it in schoolwork. And there was a special thrill in the idea that the CIA, a famously secretive organization, was the one providing it to you
Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”
The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.
If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.
At least the raw information the World Factbook collected is available elsewhere (and the current version of the Factbook is available on the Internet Archive). The same is not true of some of the other casualties in the war on information, which have fallen victim to both ideology and incompetence. The executive branch has removed data from its websites, such as those of the CDC, the Census Bureau, and other departments, or removed the webpages that hosted them. Almost 3,400 data sets were removed from Data.gov in the first month of Trump’s term alone. At the start of the second Trump administration, some nongovernmental bodies worked to preserve government data by scraping information from existing sources. That’s valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help with future data—or data that never get collected in the first place.
I came of age when the U.S. was still the leader of the so-called “free world.” We made mistakes. Plenty of them. But the world was not only our oyster then, it was our responsibility. We were in control, not out of control.
Good times?