A Good American

"How our security was sold for money"

Feb 3 2017 TV-14 1h 40m
Biography, Documentary, History

A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the US constitution.

Plot

A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the US constitution. The tool was perfect - except for one thing: it was way too cheap. Therefor NSA leadership, who had fallen into the hands of industry, dumped it - three weeks prior to 9/11. In a secret test-run of the program against the pre-9/11-NSA database in early 2002 the program immediately found the terrorists. This is the story of former Technical director of NSA, Bill Binney, and a program called ThinThread.

Written by

Friedrich Moser

Directed by

Friedrich Moser

Cast

William Binney, Jesselyn Radack, Kirk Wiebe

Crew

View crew

Production Countries

Austria

Production Companies

Slingshot Films, Blue + Green Communication

Languages

English

Awards

1 win & 8 nominations total

Scores
# of Votes
1,375
Average Rating
7.3 out of 10
Metascore
63
Popularity
NA