What the disinterest comes down to is "show, don't tell". Snowden told everyone that the government is spying on them. Oliver is trying to make that more tangible by telling everyone "You know they've seen your dick, right?" The interesting thing here is that Snowden could've affected real change if he actually leaked a section of the corpus of data the NSA had collected.
Last year's celebrity nude scandal was characterized as "sexual abuse" against the people whose photos got published. What kind of impact would've been made if an equivalent dump of "normal" people occurred? People hate revenge porn sites and anything that seems to indicate that nudes may be published without the consent of the depicted persons.
It's a very interesting question to ask: would the indiscriminate embarrassment and exposure caused by a leak of say, one day's worth of the NSA's collected data, be worth the awareness that leak would cause, and the changes it may or may not provoke? Would that not be the most fair way to judge whether the NSA's collection of that data is really warranted? Snowden says he's all about letting the people judge for themselves, but as Oliver notes, he made a series of disclosures that require a significant technical background to fully grasp (perhaps part of his partnership with Greenwald et al was based around the hope that they could further personalize the story). Wouldn't his purpose have ultimately been better served by taking and publishing a raw chunk of the sampled data?
Last year's celebrity nude scandal was characterized as "sexual abuse" against the people whose photos got published. What kind of impact would've been made if an equivalent dump of "normal" people occurred? People hate revenge porn sites and anything that seems to indicate that nudes may be published without the consent of the depicted persons.
It's a very interesting question to ask: would the indiscriminate embarrassment and exposure caused by a leak of say, one day's worth of the NSA's collected data, be worth the awareness that leak would cause, and the changes it may or may not provoke? Would that not be the most fair way to judge whether the NSA's collection of that data is really warranted? Snowden says he's all about letting the people judge for themselves, but as Oliver notes, he made a series of disclosures that require a significant technical background to fully grasp (perhaps part of his partnership with Greenwald et al was based around the hope that they could further personalize the story). Wouldn't his purpose have ultimately been better served by taking and publishing a raw chunk of the sampled data?