A Good American

EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN should see this. We, the taxpayers need to stand up and make sure these people never hold another public position EVER.

Watch this film, I will not list any spoilers. Beware- you too will get angry.

They have blood on their hands.

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.

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 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.

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.