I remember being shocked you could just go to the CIA website and just look shit up. Obviously nothing classified but elementary school me felt so cool learning about the gdp of Bhutan

CIA just has like all the basic info you could need on a country and CRS has a report on everything we do it’s incredible

Part of the early days of Wikipedia was just copying the CIA factbook

I'm pretty sure I had a class in fifth or sixth grade that required us to use the CIA World Factbook as the primary starting point, back in the late '90s!