Dodgy Governments Hate Public Information

The Trump Government in the USA has just deleted one of the world’s broadest and most relied upon databases of national statistics with little warning and no clear reason why.

On February 4th, the CIA published a statement that the CIA World Factbook had been shut down. This database contained vital and foundational statistics about virtually every nation-state on the planet covering things like population, land area, literacy rates, GDP/capita and a huge amount of deeper information for folk who wanted an overview of their country of interest. Other public databases such as Wikipedia have often relied on the Factbook as their primary source.

Now, the CIA are more-or-less the opposite of the “good guys” in the world and they have a long history of disrupting or even bringing down governments that don’t vassal themselves to the American Empire – especially when those governments are left-leaning, democratically elected and decide to nationalise assets and resources that the US would rather take for themselves (or, in the case of Venezuela last month, at least two of out of the three or even just the last one will do) and it should be said that the World Factbook’s data was often drawn from those operations or from intelligence gathering to facilitate them. The farewell message itself admits that many of the photographs on the database were derived from CIA agents in those countries.

The database itself was also an exercise in public PR for the agency and was sometimes used to push the American POV or diplomatic line on certain topics – particularly things like the US’s preferred view of disputed borders.

So rather than a lament the demise of this particular database, we should focus on the signal it sends. That this is yet another sign of a supposedly democratic government hiding information to the public so that they and only they can control its release and shape the narrative of the story to come.

In this sense, there’s very little difference between this shutdown and in the post-Brexit years when the UK pulled out of the EU’s Eurostat database and then just didn’t bother to renegotiate a cooperation deal despite the EU’s willingness to do so. This has led to the UK not just vanishing from the database but also for UK statistics to start diverging from EU statistics and standards to the point that they are harder to compare to each other. Or more recently with Keir Starmer only admitting the extent to which he knew about Peter Mandelson’s involvement with Jeffery Epstein before the former’s Ambassadorial appointment AFTER information was released that proved his initial position of ignorance was a lie.

And then there’s Scotland where the Government is presently in court trying to actively prevent the release of public data that it has been ordered to produce, while simultaneously voting against measures to expand Freedom of Information on the grounds that we already have quite enough of that, thank you, and that they don’t need a law to force them to do something that they could do voluntarily even though they are not doing that voluntarily when the present law says they should.

This is how democracies die in the dark. If the public are unable to verify statements made by governments because we can’t see the data and evidence underpinning those statements then we fundamentally cannot trust what they say because too often, we find out later we cannot trust them at all.