On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver travels to Russia to speak with Edward Snowden about the NSA, privacy, security and d**k pics. As it turns out, ‘those’ photos are the key to involving Americans in curtailing our intrusive surveillance programs. If not for X-rated photos, Americans don’t much care how nosy the NSA gets, and it the entire mess is due to be authorized again on June 2nd.
Don’t touch that dial. By the end of this video, you’ll want to send a photo of your junk for freedom!
It’s sad to hear Edward Snowden’s altruistic remarks. “The world deserved to understand the situation in which they lived.” He adds, “My greatest fear was that it would be a three day story, and then be forgotten.”
It is John’s sad duty to tell Edward Snowden that his sacrifice failed. Oh yes, it highly irritated the government., but a cross-section of Americans have not a clue who Snowden is. This was a bitter pill for the man in exile to swallow, but it was his opportunity to educate John’s audience. Fortunately, John – like us, doesn’t want to be educated on the topic. It’s boring and complicated…But, John finds a way we can all relate to and care about security. Picking up on something Snowden said about the NSA passing clothless photos around, John had the key to involving the American public, he had only to convince Snowden to work within the parameters of the d*** pic.
To prove his theory, John showed Edward a clip of the same people who didn’t know about him. This time they were told about the photos and how widely distributed they are. Reaction was immediate. John predicted it would terrify people, and it did. A typical response:
‘THEY SHOULD NEVER EVER HAVE A PICTURE OF MY D**K!’ This, is a common sentiment, as is this: ‘I WOULD WANT THE DIC PIC PROGRAM CHANGED!’ Good news, we don’t officially have a ‘d**k pic’ program, but we do have people’s attention!
. Cleverly following the trail of a typical ‘junk’ photo,John was able to get an informative and entertaining description of the programs and how they work to distribute your treasured photo far and wide. Snowden names the programs used to distribute your email, Facebook, google and other images, which work as deputized collection agency for the NSA. Although you sent a photo to someone in the next cubicle it will go to an overseas database, where it is fair game for the NSA to grab and keep forever and ever. They keep it, unless of course someone gets into their database and distributes it. I like to think that a future generation will unearth those millions (or billions) of photos, and wonder at a people who so carefully documented their – well, junk.
Patriotic music should be playing as John ends the interview.’ Wouldn’t the logical thing be to stop sending potentially embarrassing photos?’ John asks. Surprisingly, Snowden says ” no, you shouldn’t change behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing.” The music swells, and Snowden continues; “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.”
Our ‘values’ are the ability to send (extremely) personal photos of our junk ? Whatever gets Americans up and motivated to put a stop to government snooping is a noble cause.