Comment by lvspiff
5 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
that is almost certainly the point
It was a great resource for basic facts about countries. Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being useful.
I was in middle school in the 90s and I had that URL memorized. Used it a lot as a reference for class projects.