John Oliver talks penis pics with Snowden

HBO's faux journalist/comic John Oliver went to Russia to interview secrets-leaker Edward Snowden and mostly they talked about penis pictures.

Actually, they used a different phrase that we can't use but you get the idea.

It came up in the interview, in a Moscow hotel room last week, when Oliver asked Snowden whether Amerca's snoopy spy agencies can see your naked pictures online.

Yup, answered Snowden. If you send a picture of your penis in an email that crosses international borders, he told the alarmed-looking Oliver, "your (pic) ends up in a database."

The Snowden interview, which aired Sunday night on Oliver's show, Last Week with John Oliver, was aimed at giving Oliver a chance to discuss, in a serious-comic way, the reach of America's digital spying apparatus. (Oliver thinks it's too broad.)

Ex-NSA analyst Snowden helped unmask what the NSA has been up to for years with a massive leak of classified documents to the media in 2013.

So Oliver spent "48 paranoid hours in Moscow" in order to query the "the most famous hero and/or traitor in American history" about the NSA, privacy and security, and...penis pics.

True, Oliver did make Snowden squirm a bit when he pressed him on whether he read every single document he leaked, and whether the leaks hurt national security.

"You're giving documents with information you know could be harmful, which could get out there," Oliver told Snowden. "You have to own that."

"You're never be completely free from risk if you're free," Snowden responded.

Snowden has been living in Russia since his document dump, protected from U.S. authorities who want to prosecute him for leaking classified material.

Oliver also elicited some other nuggets from Snowden: He confessed that he does, indeed, "miss Hot Pockets very much."

And when Oliver shows him a series of man-on-the-street interviews that suggest that at least some Americans have no clue who Edward Snowden is, he puts a positive spin on this for Snowden, who's stuck in Russia for the time being.

"On the plus side, no one knows who you are, so maybe you can go home," Oliver says.

Snowden doesn't appear to be persuaded.