A Good American

William Binney was a cryptanalyst who worked at the National Security Agency for more than thirty years. With a small team he developed a system called ThinThread, designed to gather electronic traffic, filter it against targets and return results in real time, while keeping the data of American citizens encrypted. ThinThread was cancelled three weeks before the attacks of 11 September. Binney resigned shortly after them. The agency turned instead to a far more expensive programme called Trailblazer, which was itself eventually shut down. In 2002 Binney and his colleagues went to the Defense Department's inspector general asking for the spending to be investigated. Friedrich Moser's film tells all this and takes one step further: it argues that the attacks could have been prevented had ThinThread been running. That last part is a claim; it is not established and the agency does not accept it. Nobody from the other side speaks in the film.