By Anshul Tewari:
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified NSA documents to the media, and exposed that the privacy of American citizens was being infringed upon by global government surveillance programs was recently profiled in Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary – Citizenfour. Snowden has given tons of interviews till date, but it took the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight to crack him up in an interview which many are dubbing as the “toughest interview with Edward Snowden”.
While Oliver did pull off his classic potshots at Snowden, he did not leave any chance of asking him some of the toughest questions about what his exposé could have led to – “How many of those documents have you actually read?” he asked Snowden. “I do understand what I turned over,” said Snowden. But that wasn’t good enough for Oliver.
“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,” said Oliver.
When Snowden tried to justify the “fuck up” that New York Times did by not redacting a slide properly, Oliver exclaimed – “Right. But you have to own that then,” grilled Oliver. “You’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there.”
Check out the full interview below:
To know what I think about this video and surveillance, hit me up on Twitter at @anshul_tewari.