CIA officer discusses privacy issues

Today’s citizens face an invasion of privacy, and a former CIA agent said they don’t often realize the extent. 

Covert CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame Wilson spoke about issues of national security Tuesday night in Alumni Hall in the Indiana Memorial Union.

Bloomington residents gathered to hear Plame’s lecture and voice their own worries about government overstep.

As an agent of the CIA, Plame worked to protect America’s national security and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, according to a press release.
Without warning, in 2003, Plame’s secret status was revealed.

Senior White House and State Department officials exposed her identity to journalists, including a syndicated conservative columnist, who published her name.

“This clearly was, in our eyes, partisan payback,” Plame said.

Plame said her group in the CIA was focused on finding the team of scientists in the Iraqi program that were creating nuclear materials, but they found no traces of them.
“There was a great deal of pressure on the CIA, and we had very little information,” Plame said.

Plame focused her discussion on the issue of national security and privacy within the government. 

She explored issues within the National Security Agency, which has been found to process vast streams of sensitive personal information from citizens.

The information was shared with American partners in Britain, and news of the privacy breach broke with the help of Edward Snowden and Wikileaks.

“Virtually all international telephone calls go through the United States,” Plame said.  

A program called “Upstream” looks at the content and data that passes through the United States. This program has been contracting as far back as the Ronald Reagan years, Plame said.

Plame’s talk, titled “Connectedness: Modern Intelligence and My Life as a Spy,” was sponsored by Union Board and the College of Arts and Sciences as part of the Themester series, “Connectedness: Networks in a Complex World.”

In a question and answer portion of Plame’s talk, one student asked Plame about the best way to initiate change within the government.

Plame said the best thing students can do is to educate themselves and find a group of others who share similar interests.

Though she does not agree with the invasion of privacy, she said she is grateful for her years serving in the CIA.

“I loved what I did,” Plame said. “It offered a wonderful career. I got to serve my country and do something I thought was really interesting.”

Today’s citizens are faced with a vast intelligence center, Plame said.

About 1.4 million people have top-secret security clearance, Plame said, so it should not have surprised world leaders in today’s society that they are being watched.

“We have become so accustomed to this invasion of privacy that we are giving it up voluntarily,” Plame said. “I, for one, am not willing to take it at face value when they say, ‘Trust us.’”

Follow reporter Torie Schumacher on Twitter @shoe_torie.