Last week German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, quoted a confidential letter sent by the director of the European commission’s security services to its head of human resources.
The leaked memo warned that “the threat of espionage is increasing day by day”.
“A number of countries, information seekers, lobbyists, journalists, private agencies and other third parties are continuing to seek sensitive and classified information,” the memo said.
Commission officials have since strongly denied targeting journalists in particular.
“We are not only pointing the finger at journalists. It could be the pretty trainee with the long legs and the blonde hair,” a commission spokeswoman said.
To impugn journalists for doing their job and trying to expose wrongdoing is dangerous, of course our elected representatives must submit to public scrutiny. The commission’s response to the backlash from journalists was bizarre and sexist, drawing on a cold-war cliche to suggest that attractive blonde women are likely spies.
It is the commission’s responsibility to be able to tell the difference between a spy and a journalist. Bluring the boundaries works to the detriment of everyone.
What did the “pretty trainee with the long legs and the blonde hair” ever do to this particular commission spokeswoman?
(25 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)
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I think this is discriminating, because it implies that only beautiful, long-legged women are spies.
The Commission, always very attentive to anti-discrimination, should ban such language from its internal and external use…
Let’s be honest though - if you were a spymaster looking for an agent to infiltrate a bureaucratic monolith, you’d go for the long-legged blond.
I wouldn’t choose a pasty faced blogger like me, that’s for sure!