John Oliver surprised viewers of his Sunday night show by revealing his biggest coup yet – a trip to Russia to interview NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who remains in hiding there, after leaking numerous documents about the US government’s surveillance of citizens.
The two covered a lot of ground, but framed the conversation around Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allowing the US government to monitor personal communication between citizens.
They discussed this in the context of a question many people can get on board with: whether or not the US government can access its citizens naked pictures. The short answer, according to Snowden is that yes, is can, and does.
“The good news is there’s no program named The Dick Pic Program”, Snowden explained. “The bad news is they are still collecting everyone’s personal information, including dick pics.”
“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or [if it] at anytime crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,”
he continued.
he continued.
“Even if you send it to somebody within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go from New York to London and back and get caught up in the database.”
“When your junk was passed [from data center to data center] by Gmail, the NSA caught a copy of that – PRISM is how they pull your junk out of Google with Google’s involvement.”
He ended things off by urging Americans not to change their behaviour, just because government agencies are doing the wrong thing. “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much,” he said.
At this point, Oliver is one of only a handful of journalists to travel to Russia to interview Snowden. You can watch the whole wide-ranging discussion here, although as of right now, the video is geoblocked by HBO.
