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I thought it was quite clever. Especially if you watch the pre-amble to interview, you can see he's trying to strip away some of the "sub-issues" to just hit at the main one. Especially clear in the pre-amble, he's assembling a single "call to action". That the patriot act is due to be renewed at the beginning of June, and that given what we do know now, it could probably use a spring clean first. He never actually makes that call on whether Snowden actually did the right thing or not. This is matches with the first few questions on the interview where he's surprisingly harsh on Snowden, on what he's shared with who, how, etc. This is perfect. At this point if you do agree with Snowden's actions, you're still here. But more importantly, if you don't, you haven't been alienated either. You've just seen John address some issues that most interviews have treated with kid gloves, and practically scold him for them. Next, he discards the issue of foreign surveillance. This is where he seems quite rude, but Snowden quietly agrees with him - the general populace just doesn't care. To paraphrase NZ's prime minister, if your spies weren't spying on people you'd want to know why not. How much is appropriate, and how far spying on allies hurts foreign relations, is a really tough nut to crack - but more importantly, completely irrelevant to the discussion of the Patriot Act's upcoming renewal. And then you reach the meat of the interview, if you'll excuse the pun, where - yes, there's some showmanship involved in getting people to pay attention, even if they're paying attention for the wrong reason. But essentially he strips away the hypotheticals, strips away the "if you've got nothing to hide", and lays it out. It's a bit more loud and crass than I expect from an Englishman, but we're having this conversation, so it worked. He bookends the show with a simple idea - that if we can't discuss and address an issue as nice and clear as the Patriot Act being too over-reaching for 2015, then the other, smaller details have no chance. This is the context for the interview itself - simply trying to revive the conversation that we had 2 years ago, in time for it to be politically relevant. |