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.

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.

"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.

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.