A Good American

This documentary places the U.S. intelligence community's failure to thwart the 9/11 attacks into the context of that community's attempts since WW2 to grapple with "Big Data," the ever-growing cache of data created in the digital world. The film is not overtly political, which some will appreciate, and others not.

The irony here is that a film about overwhelming data is quite short on the details. There is little explanation as to how the subjects' data-collection system, ThinThread, actually worked and the sorts of meaning-making it undertook. There are no examples as to the significant results of analyzing metadata. I don't mean to say the film was overly dumbed-down for those without knowledge of software development, coding, or cryptanalysis. To the contrary, the subjects would make a few highly technical yet vague statements about their project, then move on.

Ultimately, the subject matter is riveting and infuriating, and I bet anyone watching this will be driven to do further research on ThinThread and the NSA and DoD's scandalous treatment of it before and after 9/11. Yet the documentary's vagueness--and relative lack of follow-through about attempts to reveal this scandal to the public--leave the film feeling like conspiracy theory rather than investigative reporting or whistleblowing.

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.

I read the following description before watching this documentary and it really piqued my interest:

""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."

I saw no evidence their system could magically pick up any electronic signal in the world.

As someone with a technical background I saw nothing more than network packet sniffing.

The so called "graph" or sphere with trillions of connections was an interesting concept but seems implausible and there was no detail on how they were compiling, storing and querying this data. The whole film seemed to lack any detail and therefore felt dull and unimpressive.

In fact the most interesting part I paused the screen to look at was a totally basic flow chart outlining a vague data capture process that essentially said "if the user is American, do nothing, otherwise log details". Hardly groundbreaking research.

Most of the "experts" were pretty unconvincing. The main protagonist kept referring to the software developers as "the computer guys", like he'd never seen a computer before in his life.

This documentary is a true story about 6 Brave, Intelligent NSA Computer Analysts wrongfully abused for trying to protect US from Our Governments illegal surveillance's. It also shows how the govt stopped the operation of our defensive network tracking terrorist communications 3 weeks before the 9/11 Trade Center Attack.

Let's be honest, A good American is not the easiest documentary to watch, with alot of things that are to us, 'the normal human beings', difficult to understand. It's basically about Big Brother watching us, in everything we do, as soon as we are using an electronic device. The right to privacy might be written somewhere but the truth is that they couldn't care less about the right of your privacy. For brainwashed America it should be a mandatory watch, so that maybe people would open their eyes, on how the whole system there is just controling the masses and making as much money as they can, well only for the chosen few then, not for you and me, the common people. It's not about your safety, they don't really care about that, it's a bonus that's all. It's all about greed and power. That exactly people of 'good will' like the former technical director of the NSA William Binney, that created a system that could have prevented 9/11, get harassed by their own government is just a shame and disgraceful. Not that I'm a big fan of their system, far from, but at least they didn't do it out of greed or wanting to get rich, they did it to save humanity from atrocities. So yes A Good American is worth a watch, a watch until the end, so that you can truely understand the whole picture on how corrupt the whole American system is.