Your Dick Is Fighting Terrorism, Apparently

At some point you’ve probably taken a photo of your own cock and sent it somewhere. Maybe the person asked for it, maybe she didn’t—that distinction matters considerably more than most men seem to register in the moment. But either way, the image didn’t only travel to one phone. It traveled to a server, and from there, theoretically, into the hands of an NSA analyst with a hard drive full of global dick documentation, organized and filed for national security purposes.

John Oliver flew to Moscow to ask Edward Snowden about this. Specifically about this. Last Week Tonight was already the best thing on television at that point, but the Snowden episode was something else—Oliver arriving in Russia with a laptop full of strangers’ genitals and a deadpan determination to make mass surveillance comprehensible by making it personal and obscene.

Snowden engaged with the premise seriously, which is the only correct response. The short version: yes, your naked selfies pass through systems the government can access. Bulk data collection sweeps them up incidentally under counterterrorism authority. Your cock is, technically, part of the effort to defeat the Islamic State. Congratulations on your service.

It’s funny until it lands. Oliver understood that abstract arguments about metadata collection and Fourth Amendment erosion were losing the public’s attention, but everybody immediately grasps what it means when a stranger has a photo of their genitals. The obscenity is the entry point into the actual horror—that none of us consented to any of this and it had been running for years before Snowden said anything. He knew everything and couldn’t come home, and Oliver went to him with dick jokes. Somehow that was exactly the right way to do the interview.