Do you miss America? John Oliver grills Edward Snowden on 'Last Week Tonight'

On Sunday night’s episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight British satirist John Oliver showed the audience a 20-odd minute interview that he conducted with Edward Snowden, the ex NSA employee who leaked classified government documents to the media.

The episode revolved around  Government surveillance and Oliver revealed that he traveled all the way to Moscow to interview Snowden. In the interview, Oliver is seen being himself: regularly cutting off Snowden when he trailed off topic and being rather witty at crucial junctures.

The interview starts with Snowden arriving an hour late, and some formal questions later – ‘Do you miss America? Do you miss hot pockets(microwavable American rolls)? – Oliver jumps straight in, by asking him if he actually read the documents before leaking them.

“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,” he asked.

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a f*ck up,” said Oliver.

“It is a fuckup, and those things do happen in reporting. In journalism, we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty,” Snowden said.

“Right. But you have to own that then,” responded Oliver.

As the video goes on, Oliver asked Snowden about the claim he made that the NSA was floating naked pictures of Americans. While Snowden said it wasn’t considered a big deal internally, Oliver showed him clips of Americans who were categorically against the sharing of d*ck pics.

“Well, the good news is there’s no program named ‘The D*ck Pic Program,’” Snowden said after viewing the on-the-street interview clips. “The bad news is the govt is still collecting everybody’s information—including your d*ck pics,” he added.

Oliver finally asked him about his agenda. “Did you do this to solve a problem?”

“I did this to give American people a chance to decide for themselves the government they want to have,” said Snowden. He then went on to explain his stance in official jargon, to which Oliver stopped him mid-conversation to say what we were all thinking.

“Let me stop you right there. This is the whole problem. I just glazed over. This is like the IT guy who comes into the office and you go, “oh shit, don’t teach me anything, I don’t want to learn, you smell like canned soup”,” he said.

Watch the video here: