[amyjess]

Ultimately, that argument doesn't work.

The people who can see your dick pics don't know you. You're just a nameless, faceless penis to them, and the people who might be looking at your dick picks are a nameless, faceless mass you don't know and never will know. Your dick pics are a statistic in a database. In fact, "people" probably don't even see your dick pics. A computer takes them and stashes them in a database, and the amount of data stored is so huge that the chance of any specific NSA employee running into your dick while querying the database is infinitesimal. Besides, even if the NSA wasn't involved, your ISP could see your dick pics anyway, and if you used any kind of image host to send your dick pics, so can they.

I would be much more concerned if the NSA was handing the information to people I know, but they're not. People only care about privacy when it personally affects them. For example, I'm transgender. While I'm out and proud now, that wasn't the case back when I was still living as a guy. It didn't worry me that the NSA had this information on me in a database somewhere, but I would have been very, very worried if somebody I knew personally were to discover that I'm trans (before I was ready to tell them, anyway).

Nobody cares that the NSA can see their dick pics. People might care if their friends and family can see their dick pics.

Oh, but then you might say "but... but the NSA is going to blackmail politicians by threatening to reveal their dick pics if they don't do what the NSA says". That's possible, but you don't need mass electronic surveillance to do that. J. Edgar Hoover did it back in the '60s, and he didn't use either the Internet or mass surveillance to do that. No, he targeted people he wanted to blackmail, and he had his team do some good old-fashioned detective work to dig up blackmail material on them. That the NSA can hypothetically do the same thing with mass Internet surveillance doesn't change anything one iota.

[faizshah]

You've missed the entire point of the interview. It's not that they literally are looking at your dirty pictures or literally looking over your shoulder to see every mistake or misstep you have ever made. The point is to take the NSA stories and make them relate to the lives of the average person.

As John Oliver explained to Edward Snowden in the interview, the average person doesn't care about 'bulk mass surveillance' or 'collection of metadata on personal phone calls' because they only vaguely understand these things and they scantly care about these things. What people do care about is if others know or could know about their embarrassing moments or their flaws.

Additionally they aren't literally trying to say they will use your dirty pictures to blackmail you, this is just an extreme example of what they used by John Oliver to make the issue more accessible. What they will do is if you or someone you know or someone who you know knows is involved in an NSA investigation (which we know can be so broad that you could be under suspicion even if you have never and will never commit a crime in your life), you can be subject to an investigation so invasive and with so little procedural oversight that you would once be called a conspiracy theorist for saying that this was even possible.

For more insight into just how invasive this can be just go back to the video and listen to the overview of the programs that snowden revealed, then watch a demo of Palantir showing the use cases of their software: https://www.youtube.com/user/Palantir/videos

[DougWebb]

It didn't worry me that the NSA had this information on me in a database somewhere, but I would have been very, very worried if somebody I knew personally were to discover that I'm trans (before I was ready to tell them, anyway).

Wouldn't it worry you if being trans was outlawed, either explicitly or in-practice, and this database were used to locate and target you? It's happened multiple times in this country, even in the past century, with much less convenience than it can be done now: communists, equal-rights activists and other activists, Japanese citizens during WWII, and so on. What if a new AIDS-like STD shows up, and in today's fear-mongering political climate the government chooses to round-up and isolate anyone who may be a carrier based on their lifestyle, instead of focusing on treating people who are actually infected?

These things aren't likely, but they're definitely possible, since similar things have happened before. That's why the mass collection of data "just in case" is something we should all be concerned about.

[AndrewKemendo]

I agree with you in general but disagree with this:

>That the NSA can hypothetically do the same thing with mass Internet surveillance doesn't change anything one iota.

The reality is that is is much easier to abuse these powers now than it was in Hoover's days. Think about it like this: Hoover was bootstrapping his blackmail, current leaders can do it with economies of scale.

So if the wrong person was elected or something happened to un-democratize our nation (don't think it can't happen) then there is a big juicy database that can be abused far far beyond anything anyone ever had in the history of census taking.

[tripzilch]

The same (purported) TL;DR-people that can't keep their attention-span for the actual thought-out reasons why Snowden did what he did and why it is important, also stopped listening halfway through your first sentence when they heard "people might be looking at your dick", eyes glazing over before you can even say "statistic in a database".