John Oliver sat in a Moscow hotel for a while before his latest interview subject, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, arrived securely. Oliver almost thought he wouldn’t come.
“Holy shit, he actually came. Edward fucking Snowden,” Oliver said on Sunday’s edition of “Last Week: Tonight,” as the leaker peaked his head through the door.
Oliver insisted to Snowden that Americans care little about mass surveillance at home and have zero concerns about spying abroad.
“Americans do not give a shit about foreign surveillance,” Oliver said.
“I think you’re right,” Snowden said.
Later on, Oliver dropped any pretense of humor and grilled Snowden on not having read all the documents he leaked to journalists. He then showed Snowden clips of Americans HBO interviewed who had no idea who Snowden was, or what he has done.
“Not ideal,” Oliver said. “I guess on the plus side you might be able to go home because it seems like no one knows who the fuck you are or what the fuck you do.”
Oliver finally concluded, based on those same interviews, that Americans do truly care about NSA spying if and only if the agency is collecting information about Americans’ private parts.
Snowden was ready to explain how the NSA can “snatch your junk” out of servers and Internet providers.
“Edward, if the American people understood this, they would be absolutely horrified,” Oliver pointed out.
“I guess I never thought about putting it in the context of your junk,” Snowden said.
Watch the interview, courtesy of HBO:
Uh, oh – I hope Oliver doesn’t have an active Twitter account or a public email address, because he is about to get bombarded by the Greenwald cultists. The dude-bros and emo-progs don’t like anyone making light of Fast Eddie. This could get pretty entertaining.
I cannot stand John Oliver, but I am resigned to having to suffer through seeing prominent recaps of his stupid show on TPM for the time being. But to answer his charge: I’m still waiting to hear how the constant flow of stolen information is pertinent to my Fourth Amendment rights. Because I don’t care about spying on other countries at all. But none of Snowden’s disciples can ever tell me how that affects my Constitutional rights, much less offering other countries help to avoid U.S. spying directly helps American citizens.
It’s at this point, Snowden’s disciples’ palm fronds turn into swords, as they pillory and vilify anyone who dares to question their messiah and lecture the rest of us about “the bigger picture” or “you’re a sheep! Wake up!” I’d like our stolen information back, because I didn’t appoint this guy my spokesman for anything. Then we can talk outrage.
I am rapidly becoming convinced that John Oliver is going to be a bigger force for positive social change and public engagement on the issues than Jon Stewart ever was. This bit was pure unadulterated genius, and along with his Net Neutrality piece, may get more folks talking about this issue than ever.
It’s very interesting to see how CNN spins the piece, though. CNN doesn’t link to any of the discussion about “dick pics”, which while ribald, is IMHO arguably the most important part of the piece – beceause its point is we need to get the general public to care about this issue so we can have a meaningful discussion on privacy and the renewal of the Patriot Act (which won’t happen if the key truths are buried in technical jargon about IP packet routing and server architecture). But as far as CNN is concerned, the only thing to know was that Oliver “GRILLED” Snowden (only showing the earlier clip where they talked about how much of all the documents he released which he had read, making it seem as Oliver’s only point was that Snowden is just an irresponsible twerp).
This is perhaps the most pertinent part of the interview. Snowden is NOT whistle-blower. He’s a thief that stole thousands of document of which he had no idea what they contained. The same applies to Chelsea Manning. Yes her treatment was horrific, but she was in no way shape or form a whistle-blower. She was a disgruntled soldier that stole thousands of documents, with no idea what they contained and turned them over to an arrogant jackass.
Edit: And this is how you do an interview (when it takes a comedian to actually tell the insufferable Snowden he’s basically an idiot, you know journalism is dying):
I enjoyed the Daily Show, but in my opinion Oliver has already accomplished more with his show (from an activist standpoint) than Stewart did with his.