The Duck of Minerva

Open Thread on Surveillance, Snowden, and John Oliver

Nerdblogging • Security

by Josh Busby

6 April 2015, 2326 EDT

Last night, John Oliver (the comedian no less!) had a terrific interview with Edward Snowden, which was much more introspective and challenging than the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour. Oliver sought to grapple with the necessity for secrecy in intelligence and  the moral responsibility Snowden faces for trusting journalists to properly vet what materials to release and subsequent errant release of sensitive material (like anti-ISIS operations in Iraq):

He continued, “So The New York Timestook 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.”

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a fuckup,” said Oliver.

Oliver had a fantastic set-up on how the American public isn’t concerned about what surveillance capabilities the U.S. government has and can use against American citizens, involving an entertaining exchange about pictures of his genitalia. The whole interview is a worth a watch. All of this is part of a interesting gambit for Oliver as swashbuckling comedian/journalist/advocate that he has advanced on a series of issues in his short time on the air. Open comment thread follows on surveillance, Snowden, infotainment, etc.

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

2 Comments

  1. Charli Carpenter
    Charli Carpenter on 7 April 2015 at 22.09 EDT

    I watched with my 13y/o son tonight. Afterward we had a long chat about the tradeoff between security and privacy. I didn’t tell him what to think, just kept asking him critical questions. By the end, my normally very liberal son was still convinced that the US faces an existential threat from ISIS and that he is confident the national security gains (to him) outweigh any harm he or other citizens can reasonably expect from loss of civil liberties due to NSA surveillance. It made me wonder whether Jon Oliver’s dick-pic survey would have had the same results if taken on Liam’s generation of middle-schoolers.

    • josh
      josh on 8 April 2015 at 16.57 EDT

      Interesting. I heard of all the young guys at Rand Paul’s announcement of his candidacy who cheered the loudest when he championed privacy. The NPR story on the announcement suggested younger voters were more concerned about privacy than older voters. Your comment suggests the very young might not be especially worried about privacy either, though his reaction might be idiosyncratic. In any event, based on the Chicago Council surveys of 2014, I think in general the US public is where your son is: they are not so worried about surveillance as they are about groups like ISIS.