I realize "everybody" is saying John Oliver is "hard-hitting" and "asked tough questions" in his interview with Snowden and that it is very hard when the Daily Beast says Oliver made Edward "squirm" and Tom Nichols thinks Snowden's handlers -- and that includes Moscow -- really "flubbed" things when they let him talk to the savvy Oliver (See where he has weighed in on the American Federalist). The cool kids have concluded that Snowden's image has been tarnished (as they did before when he went on a Russian state talk show to ask a pre-fabbed question of Putin) and they feel as if their concerns about Snowden have actually been served.
I wish I could believe that -- but the success of the ill-advised "Net Neutrality" campaign led by John Oliver lets me know that I need to take a far more weather eye to this latest cultural concoction.
So let's look over the shoulder of those critical Snowden watchers and look at the mission really accomplished here with Oliver's "savvy" interview.
I vehemently disagree that the Snowden cause has been dinged here -- and the real mission accomplished is not only to elevate the tech lobbyist John Oliver -- I view him as a lobbyist for the Silicon Valley cause and not a mere comedian -- is to campaign against the Patriot Act. This interview elevates the credibility of John Oliver as "faux critical" and instills primordial fear in males that their dick pictures will be seen or displayed by the government.
First, many people are suckers for the British accent of authority, and the Monty Python accent of satire which they take for critical analysis of America.
I don't suffer from these problems.
For years, Monty Python and the British counterculture it represents have been very popular and beloved by a certain cultural segment. It is so beloved that its admirers think it is universal and would portray anyone who didn't get in line to love Monty Python as hopeless reactionaries who think every sperm is sacred or think the parrot isn't dead.
Young men and middle-aged techie men who loved Monty Python are particular suckers for this accent. That's why John Oliver is so popular and unstoppable. This is a wealthy, aggressive, influential demographic and few people can get in its way without suffering not only withering scorn but actual sexist attack and harassment on the Internet.
He doesn't appeal to me because I don't like Monty Python and I don't like British socialism. This is a cultural and age thing but I don't care -- it frees me up to see what John Oliver is really up to.
You will recall John Oliver was deployed with vicious intentionality to get "Net Neutrality" passed -- which is Google's business goal so it doesn't have to pay for the last mile.
I oppose Net Neutrality not only because I truly believe it is socialism and "ObamaCare" for the Internet -- I've studied it for years and know the agenda of the players -- I'm not for government agencies like the FCC deciding law, but the Congress deciding law.
This is a Columbia university professor's extremist vision (Tim Wu) coupled with Obama's socialist vision, and I find it deadly on many levels. It will end badly and already has, as it erodes the telecoms' power, which is our only bastion against Google hegemony. *John Oliver's shtick worked*. That's the scary part. This isn't just comedy or commentary; this is lobbying in an information war *and it works*.
John Oliver emerged (he wasn't noticed much before that) for that express lobbying purpose on Net Neutrality, and now he is taking on another very definite lobbying agenda which is to end or change the Patriot Act -- he demonstratively marks the date when the issue will come to vote in the Congress on June 1.
His episode with Snowden starts with this and mentions it a number of times. I oppose his agenda because I'm for keeping the Patriot Act. I don't like terrorists who kill 140 students in Kenya and I personally believe this was made easier by Snowden's hack in so many ways, literal and philosophical. Whatever "reforms" need to be made to intelligence gathering shouldn't be made under the duress of Snowden's hack and shouldn't be made without a public indictment and crystalline clarity about Snowden's criminality. We haven't gotten that from the Obama administration which is why I oppose all reforms, full stop. I'm not like @20committee (John Schindler) on this.
John Oliver's goal here, like any British socialist with an agenda is to address the lingering doubts about Snowden by taking them "head on" -- which is of course a feint and a dodge to achieve the goal of making the Snowden cause and its supporters more popular.
His goal is to get people to oppose the Patriot Act by saying "yes, I understand there's this critique of Snowden but..."
He never ONCE mentions Russia or the fact that Snowden is under guard or that he meets him in a hotel and not a home or office and that's it's all very murky. We're to pretend not to notice that.
His interview is filled with jumps and cuts which result from Snowden not approving things and we're to pretend not to notice that.
He ONLY challenges him on two things -- the issue of "not reading all the documents" but that's lame. We already knew that Snowden could hack but not read 1.7 million documents, and the way they've been leaked and the timing lets us know that Greenwald and Appelbaum have discovered things they didn't know they had in June 2013 when they started. But so what? Snowden's answer is that he hacked categories of documents in certain divisions that are relevant to "privacy". Snowden's comeback is impervious -- he gave the documents to the journalists, take your concerns to them.
That it's not all about privacy is easily established and even John Oliver pretends to take this on by raising the Mosul thing -- the leak of that info by the Times on a slide using his leak.
So now comes John Oliver's moment when GASP he tells Snowden he should "own" the leak of sensitive information that happened because the journalists messed up. Guess what? Snowden doesn't own it, and no male techie watching this show will feel he needs to own it because they will conclude that journalists are non-technical chumps who should let techies be the reporters instead of them. Mission accomplished.
Not a confrontation -- in fact, a chance to give the hacker Snowden a star turn.
So what is the main message of John Oliver? THE GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING AT YOUR DICK PICS.
That is designed to strike horror into the hearts of all those males who are the demographics for Monty Python and John Oliver, even if in fact they show their dick picks, as all too many of them do online.
And you know what else it's designed to do ? Ensure that Snowden's biggest critic, John Schindler, never, ever says anything about that part of it. Mission accomplished?
That's why I view this as sinister. It's extremely cunning and evil. Schindler could make the point that it was first, poor judgement on his part -- not the government -- that made it possible for dick pics to be displayed. Then next in line is Twitter -- not the NSA -- which enabled it to be displayed for long periods by not taking them down, or that it was a spurned lover who took revenge (who I continue to view, wittingly or unwittingly (likely the latter) as part of an operation against Schindler with sinister origins in Russian intelligence) -- and that Snowden has never been able to show a) that the government has any actual dick pics b) that they've used their possession of said hacked picks to harm people by pressuring them a la COIN. So it's bullshit.
Indeed, Tom Nichols picks up that very salient point in his American Federalist piece:
Except, of course, there is no evidence (as Snowden admits) that this is actually happening. Snowden’s explanation showed how far the government would have to go, and how much data it would have to sift, to find such pictures, read texts, and match phone calls. His entire case rests, as it has always rested, on what could happen if someone with evil intent were to try to seize control of a massive bureaucracy and bend it to the goal of finding out whether a random guy in New York sent his girlfriend a picture of Mr. Happy. (Which, as a random guy in New York admitted to Oliver on camera, he did.) In trying to generate more outrage, Snowden inadvertently made the case for calming down.
But no one would listen to this more subtle point because the larger message of THE GOVERNMENT IS LOOKING AT YOUR DICK PICS will drown this out.
If the vast population of mainly male techies and their fanboyz on the Internet -- the Snowdenista demographic -- was capable of absorbing this subtle critique of Snowden, they would have already last year when not a single one of Snowden's leaks produced an actual case.
WE find it a compelling argument but THEY do not.
The fear of having the government monitor your sex life -- and expose it -- is understandably high and that trumps reason. The fact that the government has not done this in a single case -- unlike Glenn Greenwald who revealed a woman's affair with a Taliban soldier or the porn habits of Muslim leaders in Pakistan -- is completely lost on this demographic.
The last time Snowden leaked something about sex cams (Yahoo) was the day of the Crimean invasion. I believe that was deliberate to create distractions in the media. So I have to wonder what awful thing Russia is planning next with this.
I realize I'm the only person in the universe with these views but I don't care. I'm 180% convinced of them.
So what's the most interesting part of this interview, one that hasn't been mentioned? The news isn't that "people don't know who Snowden is." Those who are lobbyists in the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for a Free Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Ron Wyden's office, etc. all know perfectly well who Snowden is and are unchanged by this John Oliver show showing the kind of clueless chumps that Jimmy Fallon shows on Times Square.
If anything, they know the mission has been accomplished -- utter, irrational fear has been struck into the hearts of people that the government really does have your dick pics and might show them at any moment -- because of course, the edge case, the hypothetical always trumps reality for the tech binary mind.
Recently at a tech expo in New York, I happened to see a both displaying the very robot communications device that Snowden uses to appear in the ACLU office and interact with people and project his "telepresence" elsewhere. I asked the young woman -- a "booth babe" in the techie parlance -- if she had ever heard of Snowden or that he used this telepresence device. She hadn't heard of him at all. She didn't have a clue.
But...the news is that the American people aren't as stupid as you think they are. To a man and a woman, they associated Snowden with WikiLeaks. One even said he was "in charge" of WikiLeaks -- at which Snowden did an exaggerated double-take for the camera.
Indeed, Snowden is a product and creature and operation of WikiLeaks. They helped him go to Hong Kong and Moscow, where they had already established connections for years, and they continue to help. They were the ones who convinced him to go to Russia - and he himself has a defined pro-Kremlin stance and has even accepted payments from Russian state propaganda TV, RT.com.
That the focus has gone on the journalists Greenwald and not WikiLeaks' North American representative Jacob Appelbaum, in exile from the US grand jury's probe in the Manning case in Germany, doesn't matter. Somehow, the real truth of the WikiLeaks connection has seeped through. It's amazing how you just can't hide things like that, as much as they all try to spin this.
I'd like to believe, truly I would, that John Oliver has "pantsed" Snowden. But that hasn't really happened. What's happened is that once again, the NSA is "pantsed" as "grabbing and holding your dick picks." That will have a powerful impact on the vote on the Patriot Act, because, you know, American privacy on the Internet should trump everything, including the lives of Kenyans or the security of Europe or deterrence against the war-mongering Russia.
PS. Think I'm wrong about this? Read how TechCrunch, likely the leading online tech news publication owned by AOL now, spins the Oliver interview to see it as a plus for reforming the Patriot Act. I warned you.
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