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Last night Last Week Tonight With John Oliver returned for its second season, and the satirist took on a very timely topic: government surveillance. Oliver kicks off the new season with a bang: by interviewing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Snowden, who has been living in exile in Moscow since he was revealed to have released thousands of classified documents to documentarian Laura Poitras (who directed the Oscar-winning film, Citizenfour) and journalist Glenn Greenwald. The leak revealed staggering information: the government has been able to read our emails and text messages as well as overhear our phone calls — both inside the United States and internationally.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M]

While some consider Snowden a hero and others viewing him as a traitor, Oliver’s interview with the 31-year-old former government contractor examined both sides of the issue — asking him point-blank how much of the leaked documents he actually read as well as if he is concerned with how much the classified information were delivered to the American public (transcript via The Daily Beast):

Oliver didn’t pull any punches. “How many of those documents have you actually read?” he asked Snowden with a palpable air of skepticism. “I do understand what I turned over,” the ex-CIA systems admin mumbled.

Not good enough. “There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents… because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” Oliver said.

“Right. But you have to own that then,” grilled Oliver. “You’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there.”
He continued, “So The New York Times took a slide, didn’t redact it properly, and in the end it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al Qaeda.”

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a fuckup,” said Oliver.

“It is a fuckup, and those things do happen in reporting. In journalism, we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty,” Snowden said.

“Right. But you have to own that then,” grilled Oliver. “You’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there.”

Compared to Citizenfour‘s complete heroic treatment of Snowden and the press that covered the story, Oliver caught Snowden off-guard with a question that most journalists have yet to ask him.

But more importantly, Oliver addressed the aspect of the NSA’s overreaching access to our personal lives that affects us the most: the government can see our dick pics.

“When you send your junk through Gmail, that’s stored on Google’s servers,” added Snowden. “Google moves data from data center to data center—invisibly to use without your knowledge—your data could be moved outside the borders of the United States, temporarily. When your junk was passed by Gmail, the NSA caught a copy of that… PRISM is how they pull your junk out of Google with Google’s involvement.”

Snowden paused. “I guess I never thought about putting it in the context of your junk.”

Watch Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO Go.

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