Friedrich Moser’s new documentary, A Good American, centers on a NSA analyst-turned-whistleblower, a leading expert on metadata responsible for the world’s most sophisticated global monitoring effort: ThinThread.
It was shown in many festivals, including the 2017 Palm Springs Film Fest.
The explosion of information in the digital age left government agencies like the NSA struggling with bureaucracy and technology to keep up with the changing times.
Responding to the challenge, NSA technical director Bill Binney and a small team of codebreakers develop ThinThread, an astonishingly effective data collecting and sorting program that also protects privacy.
Despite its success, ThinThread is discontinued just weeks before September 11, 2001. After Binney and fellow intelligence officials challenge this decision, they find their world upended.
The deeply disturbing journalistic docu-thriller about the system that could have prevented 9/11, but was stopped by lies and corruption at the NSA.
The mass surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden was not the first scandal in the history of the American intelligence agency NSA.
Friedrich Moser’s eye-opening A Good American soberly unfolds the deeply disturbing story of how corruption, lies and personal ambitions led to the closure of a cheap and effective monitoring system that demonstrably could have stopped the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The mind behind the ingenious system was former intelligence agent Bill Binney, whom Moser gives the opportunity to tell the whole story of how his brilliant system was abandoned in favour of an expensive, useless intelligence programme that in turn had the advantage of creating hundreds of jobs at the intelligence agency – and handsomely rewarded a number of former NSA employees.
A Good American is a chilling docu-thriller of the most dizzying kind. and may well prove to be one of the year’s most important films.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Born in 1969 in Austria, filmmaker Friedrich Moser holds a university degree (MA) in Contemporary History from the University of Salzburg (Austria). Moser started his professional career as a TV journalist in Bolzano-Bozen (Italy). In 2001 he founded the production company blue+green communication. He has made over 20 documentaries, most of them as producer, director and cinematographer. Moser’s professional career also includes lecturing on history & documentaries at the University of Vienna, Austria.
CREDITS
Director: Friedrich Moser
Writer: Friedrich Moser
Producer: Friedrich Moser (producer)
Executive Producer: Dave Lugo, Wesley Hull
Senior Producer: Michael Seeber
Cinematographer: Friedrich Moser
Editor: Jesper Osmund, Kirk von Heflin
Music: Christopher Slaski, Guy Farley
Production: blue+green communication
With the support of: Austrian Film Institute, ORF – Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Film Location Austria
In association with: El Ride Productions
Language: English
Runtime: 100 minutes
Distributor: The Film Collaborative
