A Good American

A Good American (2015)

How our security was sold for money

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.

Date of release
2015-09-23
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (38)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Friedrich Moser

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

A Good American is a 2015 Austrian documentary film that chronicles the work of whistleblower William Binney, a former official of the National Security Agency who resigned shortly after the September 11 attacks.

Background

In September 2002, Binney and two other NSA whistleblowers, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on the Trailblazer Project, which analyzed intercepted data covertly obtained from communications networks.

The Nation reported that "despite ThinThread’s proven capacity to collect actionable intelligence, agency director Gen. Michael Hayden vetoed the idea of deploying the system in August 2001, just three weeks before 9/11." Hayden’s decisions, the whistleblowers told The Nation, "left the NSA without a system to analyze the trillions of bits of foreign SIGINT flowing over the Internet at warp speed, as ThinThread could do."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended