High officials, secret emails

One more scandal is making spirits hot in Romania. The private and even very private emails of some high officials were intercepted, then disclosed and then talked about publicly. The reply or the explanation has consisted in the insistent invocation of fraud, which is indeed true, and of the interference in the private life sanctuary. This second point is arguable, especially in a country where the intercepting of mail and phone calls has been a permanent and troubling possibility. Is there a real moral difference between the indiscretion of the secret services, meant for possible blackmails (any person who becomes an official gets subject to it, theoretically) and the indiscretion of an individual turned into a prosecutor and addressing public opinion as jury ? Both types are to be blamed. The potential victims' abnormal, implicit acquiescence is noteworthy in the first case and, in the second one, this brings their protests to derision.
Of course everyone has got the right to respect for their private lives. But on the other hand, a public official, who is the object of all sorts of curiosity due to the nature of his position, must make sure that his private life is inviolable. By protecting himself and avoiding making way for such intrusions, all he does is protect his country, after all. The fact that fragments of some high officials' privacy could be on display for the public eye (probably by primitive technical means) shows their lack of caution. As far as state interests are concerned, this is a lot more severe than the indelicacy of the person who grabbed and got them printed. When a public official, and a diplomat in particular, is guilty of lacking caution, he/ she is no longer worthy of title or official position. And the trust invested in him/ her becomes pointless. To use an ordinary email address, violable by anyone, for messages meant to be confidential is an infantile mistake. Had it happened somewhere else, it would have interrupted the respective people's careers at once.
This unspeakable prose (let me briefly and sadly notice our superiors' so plain style) was certainly translated and read in certain offices of some foreign capital cities some time go. The bad reputation we thus build ourselves in the world and our officials' vulnerable image should have been the first things to trouble us, but not the publication of their poor dialogues in the Romanian press! In case where it was first read the Romanian representatives' mail caused explainable stupor, it is not only because of its contents, which is in between fishy and ridiculous, but first of all because of the spontaneity due to which the emails sent by unsafe ways offered themselves to the eyes of those interested and somehow skilled.
Apart from the moral, juridical or deontological aspects involved, this affair leaves observers, the foreign ones in particular, with the unpleasant feeling that this is because of amateurishness. Therefore we have once again managed not to let down those watching us, ready for critique.

Radu Portocala
Ziua Sambata 28 Iulie 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english