A Good American (2015) Reviews

• the piece of information that we were missing

  frantastika2016-11-16

  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.

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• A Must See

  stevechristison2017-09-13

  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.

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• When covering up leaderships ignorance, takes a back seat to the truth, America Loses

  cblast-834162017-09-19

  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.

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• The disgusting stupidity of the NSA Director

  BasicLogic2018-07-02

  General Hayden was a laughing stock to the intelligence community, an undeniable insulting stain to the American bureaucratic system. How could this guy be the director of the most critically important NSA? What he did during this capacity almost made me feel he was almost like a "Traitor" to United States of America. What he did had put America in great danger, I almost felt he was a double agent or spy from one of the America's enemies. A moron who could be promoted in the American Air Force to a four-star general was more like a practical joke the American government did to our people. His stupidity, blindness, self-obnoxiousness had cost so many Americans died in vain or critically crippled for life. "ThinThread" is simply the most genius work but this guy and those morons around him simply sabotaged it on purpose. Shame on them!!

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• The Arrogance of Power

  lavatch2018-12-16

  This superb documentary tells the story of Bill Binney and his team of code-breakers at the NSA, who developed such sophisticated technology that the attacks of 9/11 could have and should have been prevented. Binney was always ahead of the curve in his work as an analyst. In 1967, he had detected the evidence of the North Vietnamese TET offensive that should have led to greater preparedness of the American military in the 1968 offensive. He also predicted the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. By the end of the century, Binney was ahead of everyone in understanding the importance of "traffic analysis" through the gathering of "metadata." He also recognized the potential for the abuses of power in the national security network. He had worked too long with people who believed that they had so much power that they were invincible. The name of Binney's operation was Thinthread, and the film goes into great detail about the visionary work of Binney's system to track electronic and phone communications of anyone throughout the world. His program also ensured that no American citizen's identity could be compromised without a warrant. But the bureaucracy of the NSA opted for greed instead of the goal of protecting the American people. It also chose discarding civil liberties in the name of national security. The Thinthread project was disbanded in favor of outside contractors selected by General Michael Hayden. The new program called Trailblazer failed whereas Thinthread would have identified specific details about the al-Quaeda plot of September 11, 2001. Binney and his colleagues even demonstrated how the data would have been generated to prevent the attacks. In the wake of 9/11 and to prevent embarrassment to Hayden and his minions (Maureen Baginski, Bill Black, and Sam Viser), the homes of Binney and his colleagues were raided, and their programs were confiscated. This is a story of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse. It is also the story of the incompetency of unelected officials determining national policy that favor greed over security of its citizens. Vice-President Dick Cheney discussed the "dark side" that he embraced in the wake of 9/11. The film reveals how the dark side has compromised the ideals of our nation's foundational documents and how the moral standing of America in the world has possibly been irredeemably compromised.

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