For those with a sense of humour, consulting alleged facts compiled by an agency specialising in subterfuge, subversion, deception and plain mendacity must surely have been a delightful exercise. That delightful exercise would seem to have concluded earlier this month with an announcement by the US Central Intelligence Agency that it would no longer be publishing its World Factbook. Presumably the publication did not fall within what Director John Ratcliffe sees as a core mission of the agency.
The World Factbook was initially published in classified form in 1962 as “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook” intended for officials in the military and government. In 1971, an unclassified version was released, with a print version made available to the public in 1975. In 1981, it was renamed “The World Factbook” and became a web publication in 1997. “The World Factbook,” the announcement mentions, “served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.” That any reference about countries should be strapped to a one-stop point of reference compiled by an intelligence agency already bedevils the learning exercise with precarious shallowness. But scribblers, hacks and travellers often like the curated shortcut.
The World Factbook was short on the destabilising role played by the CIA in foreign countries it sought to describe, but became something of an institution for the unadventurous, uncritical researcher. It provided a tool easily and lazily accessible on rudimentary material. The Factbook, as CIA historian Tim Weiner says with admiration, “has been for 30 years an invaluable goldmine of reliable information used by students, scholars, reporters and the general public.”
This was data on the grab, with the overview of complex hinterland best left to others. John Devine of the Boston Public Library is of the view that the database was most useful on population statistics. “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?” This has more than a tinge of snobbery, especially in ignoring manifold sources of information from the United Nations, let alone any number of encyclopedias and reference sets that lack the shadow of espionage, let alone the operating interests of the CIA.
American journalists also seemed to see the repository as a golden option for starting research on a story and, it would seem, rarely going beyond it. A misty-eyed Bill Chappell reflected on this for National Public Radio (NPR), recalling his days as a callow editor at CNN International: “If journalists aim to write the first draft of history, I figured, then the Factbook, culling data from Cabinet agencies and other official outlets, could be a reliable primary source.” Librarians in the employ of CNN and NPR would be able to use the database to work out “whether a country is majority Shiite and Sunni, and what kind of government it has.”
Before heading off to Afghanistan in 1988, Weiner did not hesitate to consult the World Factbook. “It’s like you wouldn’t go off on a trip as a reporter without a map, and you wouldn’t go off to a strange country without consulting the CIA World Factbook.” The document was “a compass to discover the world.”
Teachers are also moaning about the sudden cessation of access to the material provided by an intelligence agency, a troubling state of affairs suggesting flawed pedagogy. CNN gives us this curious line: “The elimination of The World Factbook has left educators and others in the information space scrambling.” In a world of seemingly borderless information and sources, such a statement is stunningly untutored.
Rather oddly, Taylor Hale, a social studies teacher based in Oklahoma City, seems to believe that the agency’s assessments are accurate because others are more likely to fudge facts. “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,” argues Hale. “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.” Corporations lie out of cold self-interest, but the good instructor fails to appreciate that the CIA is also paid to traffic fibs in the national interest.
The closure of the Factbook’s website, including the digital shuttering of its old entries, stranded the students of Jay Zagorsky’s business class at Boston University, reportedly battling through an exam “due at midnight the next day.” According to a report in the New York Times, Zagorsky’s “exams are regularly open-Factbook, and two questions relied upon in its famously tidy tables of economic certainty.” Is setting exams to such data sets the highpoint of prudence and practice?
Some of the Factbook’s followers are devotees of the first rank. Simon Willison, a programmer dedicated to data journalism, has made archival material available through his own efforts. (The material ceases after 2020.) He regards his labour as a tribute to cultural preservation, and actions of the bureaucrats behind the site’s removal a travesty of barbarism. “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 direct to their closure announcement.”
High time for members of the public to find other sources. (The Encyclopaedia Britannica would be a capital start.) Time to stop mourning a publication by an agency that failed to do with any accuracy what it was intended to do: assess with credible accuracy the political, military and economic health of the Soviet Union, a country that imploded under its very nose in 1991.
The post Misplaced Mourning: Farewelling the CIA World Factbook appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.