Snowden job —

Edward Snowden faces John Oliver’s semi-tough questions

"How many of those documents have you actually read?" Oliver asked.

Edward Snowden and John Oliver share a laugh.
Edward Snowden and John Oliver share a laugh.
HBO

HBO talk show host John Oliver on Sunday landed his biggest interview yet since leaving The Daily Show: famed National Security Agency document leaker Edward Snowden.

The interview, which followed a lengthy Last Week Tonight monologue about American Internet surveillance, took place in Snowden's current home of Moscow. It began with a comedic, tone-setting declaration: "Holy shit, he actually came! Edward fucking Snowden!" After jokes about whether Snowden missed American icons like truck nuts and Florida, however, Oliver got to work asking about Snowden's motives and the dichotomy between domestic and foreign surveillance.

"How many of those documents have you actually read?" Oliver eventually asked. When Snowden said he'd "evaluated" them, Oliver pressed: "There's a difference between understanding what's in the documents and reading what's in the documents. When you're handing over thousands of NSA documents, the last thing you want to do is read them."

Snowden sat in awkward silence after the latter sarcastic comment.

Oliver then criticized Snowden for handing complicated documents over to journalists who are less tech-savvy than he is and possibly putting people in danger as a result of publishing them, adding, “That’s a fuck-up.” Snowden pressed on the importance of his leaks in spite of Oliver's complaints, not to mention the personal cost he paid for loosing those secrets: "You will never be completely free from risk if you're free. The only time you can be free from risk is when you're in prison."

“The dick pic program”

Shortly afterward, Oliver played a reel of a dozen Americans who couldn’t correctly answer exactly who Snowden was—including a mention of WikiLeaks that Snowden incredulously laughed at. Oliver joked about the complicated nature of the leaks—the kind of thing that makes it hard for average Americans to comprehend their scale of the leaks—and then he encouraged Snowden to get people's attention by talking more about how frequently the NSA had seen people’s naked photos sent via SMS and e-mail.

“The good news is, there’s no program named ‘the dick pic program,’” Snowden said in response. “The bad news is, they are still collecting everyone’s information, including your dick pics.” Oliver followed that up by showing Snowden “a picture of my dick”—viewers didn’t see the pic, just Snowden’s alarmed reaction to seeing it. Snowden proceeded to explain how the NSA, using the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, has almost certainly put “your junk in a database,” thanks to common data transfers between domestic and international servers on services like Gmail.

"Google moves data from data center to data center—invisibly to you without your knowledge," Snowden said, at which point Oliver groaned. "Your data could be moved outside the borders of the United States temporarily." Snowden explained programs like Prism, Upstream, and Mystic to Oliver in the context of his "junk" being spied upon as well.

The interview ended with Oliver mockingly asking what the "over/under" was on his safe return to the United States. Snowden smiled and replied, "Well, if you weren't on the list before, you are now. You're associated now." Oliver indicated that the White House, the NSA, and the National Security Council declined to respond on the record about any "dick pic" surveillance or other surveillance methods Snowden mentioned in the Last Week Tonight interview.

Snowden has ramped up his public and media appearances over the course of the past two years, including a reddit "ask me anything" Q&A in February to promote Citizenfour's HBO premiere.

Channel Ars Technica