Turns out the agency was substantially overestimating the country's population. The long-used number -- 33.6 million -- was derived from a 30-year-old census that has now been determined to be high.
Not just a little too high, but 5.2 million people too high. The new official count, 28,396,000, is lower by more than 15 percent. A CIA spokesman e-mailed Friday that the agency's population figures, both the old and new ones, were provided by the population division of the U.S. Census Bureau.
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