John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight tonight might only air once a week, but it’s quickly becoming the best news show on television. Last week Oliver was off the air for a very good reason: He was in Moscow, Russia interviewing Edward Snowden, the in-exile former CIA contractor who leaked thousands and thousands of NSA documents about top secret government surveillance programs.
At first, he put Snowden on blast directly to his face: “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.” Adding:
John Oliver: “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.”
Edward Snowden: “That is a problem.”
Oliver: “Well, that’s a fuckup.”
But then Oliver got into Snowden’s privacy infringement issues via the U.S. Government’s classified global surveillance programs. The problem is that it’s hard to get young people to give a shit about the programs unless you boil it down to something they care about.
Like dick pics. Everyone cares about dick pics.
So John Oliver had Edward Snowden explain how the government is stealing your private dick pics and keeping them under lock and key in a massive database. While there’s no such thing as the so-called “Dick Pic Program” joked about in the interview, it’s very likely your dick pics are being stolen by the NSA, according to Snowden.
It’s a brilliant half-hour segment that deserves your full attention. John Oliver continues to be the best thing to happen to television in a long, long time.