HS-04. A Good American

Austria, 100 min., Feature Documentary

The best codebreaker in the U.S. develops an in-house program for the National Security Agency (NSA) that can pick up every electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets, render results in real time and still keep the privacy as demanded by law. But NSA leadership dumps the program in favor of the multi-billion-dollar Trailblazer program, which was an unmitigated disaster. A month after 9/11, a friend of the protagonist does a secret test-run against the pre-9/11 database. The program finds everything: perpetrators, targets, code names and connections. NSA whistle-blower Bill Binney finally tells the real story of the USA’s colossal intelligence failure before 9/11.