A Good American

So this is not some gripping thriller. It's reality, it's a documentary. It narrates how some very smart, ethical people in the intelligence agencies were trying to stay one step ahead of some very dangerous people. If this were turned into some fictional story you could make it fantastically interesting in the hands of a good script writer I'm sure. People who reviewed this movie poorly, fail to see the significance of this. They likely believe that essentially "the story of 9/11 is how some foreigners brought the military and intelligence community of the greatest super power in human history to its knees". You can discount my opinion (in quotes) and it's significance if you are so inclined. But you shouldn't discount the fascinating & informative value of the story told here and the quality of the production.

Many documentaries show us situations that we have some idea, that somewhat we know a bit or we have heard or read about it but not deep enough. For that reason, this documentary was a complete surprise from the beginning to the end and it seems the audience was very compelled too through the whole film... so I guess I wasn't the only one feeling like "how this happened and I did not read or hear anything about it". The topic is extremely important and current; we have several documentaries about how important is protect our data and privacy but not so many about how we got in this situation. Here is that piece we were missing and helps a lot to make sense nowadays with our sense of surveillance. We have films about Edward Snowden and the last one, "Snowden", have the Nicolas Cage's character base in the creator of "Thin thread" that is the man, the good American.

This film reveals that the inner workings of our intelligence agencies and the NSA in particular, often place the security of US Citizens below the motive for profit. It shows that these intelligence agencies can be more fearful of embarrassment than of attacks by extremist organizations. It has the courage to state facts and name names. It describes how software already in place at the NSA that actually predicted the 9/11 attacks was totally shut down mere months before the actual attack occurred.

"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.

Variety called the film "compelling if only semi-persuasive," and said that it was marred by bias toward William Binney. The Guardian described the film as a "fascinating, conspiracy theorising documentary", and said that while "some of the film's content has been aired before, the inside experience has not been voiced in such a collective manner, with (director) Moser joining the dots just as Binney might connect his metadata." I tend to side with Variety here. Although I enjoyed the documentary, it does have two major flaws. One, it really only tells Binney's side. That might be alright, but it allows the idea to be pushed that 9/11 would have been prevented, which cannot be said with as much confidence as he wishes. And two, for a film about a super-smart computer and global terror, it is a rather boring documentary. This should be gripping, but it was really rather mundane.

A third point could be added... why make this in 2015 (and release it in 2017)? While no less interesting today than ten years ago, it does not seem as timely.

A Good American highlights the brilliance of the American Mind & ingenuity, while exposing the utter buffoonery & incompetence of those leading the American Intelligence Community.

Good American reveals the importance of holding senior intelligence officers accountable for their failures. Rather than holding congressional inquires into the ignorance and incompetence of General Hayden & Maureen Baginski, the intelligence community invests all the resources available to them in order to discredit, intimidate, incriminate, & indite the whistle-blowers who simply tell the truth of their leaderships ineptitude.

It makes it hard to teach your children to be accountable for their actions when they grow up in a country who refuses to be accountable for its own actions. At some point America needs to look in the mirror and hold its leaders accountable for the compete and utter incompetence, bordering on treasonesque, instead of using all of its resources to villainize whistle-blowers for exposing the truth.