Watch John Oliver Travel to Moscow to Ask Edward Snowden About Your Dick Pics and the NSA


In the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver traveled to Moscow for an in-depth interview with Edward Snowden, or as Oliver introduced on his show as “the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history.”

The segment, which started out measuring how much the NSA whistleblower missed Hot Pockets, quickly delved into surprisingly tough questions aimed at Snowden and the arguable value over his massive surveillance leak. At one point, Oliver even challenged Snowden by asking how many of the leaked NSA documents he actually took the time to read.

“I do understand what I turned over,” Snowden responded.

“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 want to do is read them,” Oliver shot back.

Throughout the rest of the episode, which was pegged to the upcoming June 1st deadline for Congress to reauthorize or end the controversial Patriot Act, Oliver repeatedly reminds Snowden that Americans don’t seem to care very much about government surveillance. But when it comes to more intimate matters, that’s a different story.

“This is the most visible line in the sand for people: Can they see my dick?” Oliver said.

“Well, the good news is there’s no program named the ‘Dick Pic’ program,” Snowden explained. “The bad news is that they are still collecting everybody’s information—including your dick pics.”

Watch the full exchange below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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