Snowden: The Government Might Have Your D*ck Pics

HBO’s Last Week Tonight show interviewed Edward Snowden on the latest episode after host John Oliver took a trip to speak to Snowden in person.

In an effort to get the American public to take seriously the problems of government surveillance, Oliver asked Snowden about government surveillance in a context more people might be familiar with: dick pics.

Can the government secretly access American’s naked photos and selfies?

“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or [if it] at anytime crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,” said Snowden.

He added, “Even if you send it to somebody within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go from New York to London and back and get caught up in the database.”

Oliver shared his concern that the public isn’t taking invasions of privacy by the federal government seriously by showing Snowden clips of people in Times Square. The crews came back with tapes of people saying “I have no idea who Edward Snowden is.”

Oliver asked him, “Is it a conversation that we have the capacity to have? Because it’s so complicated, we don’t fundamentally understand it.”

“It’s a real challenge to figure out — how do we communicate things that require sort of years and years of technical understanding, and compress that into seconds of speech, so I’m sympathetic to the problem,” Snowden said.

But once Oliver turned the conversation to naked selfies in Times Square, the tune changed. “If my husband sent me a picture of his penis, and the government could access it, I would want that program to be shut down.”

It’s all in the messaging, folks.