Edward Snowden faces John Oliver’s semi-tough questions

Edward Snowden and John Oliver share a laugh.

HBO

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

The interview, which followed a lengthy Last Week Tonightmonologue about American Internet surveillance, took place in Snowden's current home ofMoscow. 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, Thats 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."

Shortly afterward, Oliver played a reel of a dozen Americans who couldnt correctly answer exactly who Snowden wasincluding a mention of WikiLeaks that Snowden incredulously laughed at. Oliver joked about the complicated nature of the leaksthe kind of thing that makes it hard for average Americans to comprehend their scale of the leaksand then he encouraged Snowden to get people's attention by talking more abouthow frequently the NSA had seen peoples naked photos sent via SMSand e-mail.

The good news is, theres no program named the dick pic program, Snowden said in response. The bad news is, they are still collecting everyones information, including your dick pics. Oliver followed that up by showing Snowden a picture of my dickviewers didnt see the pic, just Snowdens 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 centerinvisibly 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 Mysticto Oliver in the context of his "junk" being spied upon as well.

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Edward Snowden faces John Oliver’s semi-tough questions