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A Good American

Friedrich Moser
100' / 2015 / Austria
Web: http://www.agoodamerican.org/
English
Spanish subtitled

Audience vote 8.38

After the end of the Cold War the best code-breaker the US ever had together with a small team within NSA starts to develop a revolutionary surveillance program. It can pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets, render results in real time and all of it without invading privacy. The program is perfect – except for one detail: it’s too low cost. Therefore the tax dollar hungry NSA management dumps it – three weeks prior to 9/11.
When in the aftermath of the attack NSA starts its mass surveillance of Americans, the code-breaker leaves the agency. A friend takes over and manages to revive the program in early 2002, for a test-run against the biggest NSA-data collection, based on the data known prior to 9/11. As he turns on the program immediately pop up the terrorists on the computer screen. NSA’s response: Completely shut the program down! This is the story of Bill Binney, a program called ThinThread and how the perfect alternative to mass surveillance was ditched by NSA for money.
“A Good American” tells one of the most important stories of the information society and dissects the inner workings and ties of a politico-economic network whose reach goes way beyond America.

Main Festivals & Awards

CPH: DOX 2015 / DOCS NYC 2015 / Palm Springs International Film Festival 2016 – Best of Fest Award / International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016 – Perspective Blind spots / Diagonale Film Festival 2016 / IFF Portland 2016 / Sedona Film Festival 2016 / Millennium International Film Festival 2016 / Movies That Matter 2016 / Thessaloniki Film Festival 2016

Director's Biography

Born 1969 in Gmunden / Austria. Friedrich holds a university degree (MA) in history and German studies from the University of Salzburg, Austria. Friedrich started his professional career as a TV journalist in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy. In 2001 he founded the film & TV production company blue+green communication.
In 2008 Friedrich successfully attended the Documentary Campus, a European master-class for non- fiction filmmaking, where he refocused on the international market. Friedrich’s professional career also includes lecturing on history & documentaries at the University of Vienna, Department of Economic and Social History, as well as teaching video production at the Secondary School for Commercial Graphics in Bressanone-Brixen, Italy.
Friedrich has made over 20 documentaries in the past years, most of them as author / producer / director / cinematographer, among them the feature documentary THE BRUSSELS BUSINESS (2012) about lobbying in Brussels. The film had festival, theatrical, non-theatrical, broadcast and VoD release in more than 15 countries. Most of Friedrich’s films have been documentaries for broadcast, research centers and museums.
Friedrich Moser is based in Vienna / Austria with collaborators in London, New York and Los Angeles.