Remember our blog post about the promotion statistics cable that was classified as SBU?  In March, a Foggy Bottom nightingale informed us that the State Department had released its promotion statistics internally. We have not seen a copy of the cable.  We were told that the promotion stats are now protected by the following authorities:

Privacy Act of 1974 – which is terribly funny because the Privacy Act of 1974 purposely has a line that says “(B) but does not include–    (i) matches performed to produce aggregate statistical data without any personal identifiers;”

So then, somebody wrote here and asked, “How does the Privacy Act apply to a bunch of numbers?” And we had to confess that we actually have no idea — unless — a bunch of numbers are now people?

Three months later, the promotion statistics which was released in an SBU cable was published by State Magazine; this is something that the magazine does every year, by the way. Only this year, it was months late.

Why bother classifying it SBU in the first place? We did an in-depth research and finally got answers!  Simply put, cables are boooring, repeat, boooring.  DGHR wanted to release the promotion statistics in a full color spectrum; except that their Color Specialist used more dark earth tones on the 8-page spread.  What’s with that? It’s summer time, forgodsakes! Next time use something cheerful like Queen Elizabeth fluroescent lime green.  Take our word for it, it’ll get everyone’s attention. Below is the extracted stats from the magazine.

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