PunditFact: Fact-checking John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance

Most Americans have a fuzzy understanding of what the National Security Agency can and cannot see with its surveillance programs, much less what a former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden tried to do about it.

That's the finding, anyway, of informal street interviews by John Oliver's crew at Last Week Tonight on HBO.

Oliver devoted his April 5 show to the NSA spying story. It included an exclusive interview with Snowden, who is living in Russia after the State Department canceled his passport. And it included the topic of this fact-check: Can emails sent between two people living in the United States unwittingly end up on the computer screen of some NSA analyst?

Oliver, who blends comedy with journalism, framed the discussion around the NSA peeping on nude pictures.

Oliver asked Snowden to describe the capability of various NSA surveillance programs in relation to nude pictures sent by Americans, starting with "702 surveillance." This refers to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. This section was added in 2008 and was renewed under President Barack Obama in 2012.

Could the NSA see a picture of, say, Oliver's privates under this provision, he asked?

"Yes," Snowden said, "the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which Section 702 falls under, allows the bulk collection of Internet communications that are one-end foreign."

After an Oliver joke about "bulk collection," Snowden continued, "So if you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or any time crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database."

Oliver jumped in and asked Snowden to clarify that the racy picture if you've seen the interview, you know we're paraphrasing wouldn't necessarily have to be sent to Germany in order to end up in NSA storage.

"No," Snowden said. "Even if you sent it to someone within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go to New York to London and back and get caught up in the database."

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PunditFact: Fact-checking John Oliver's interview with Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance