A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the US constitution. The tool was perfect - except for one thing: it was way too cheap. Therefor NSA leadership, who had fallen into the hands of industry, dumped it - three weeks prior to 9/11. In a secret test-run of the program against the pre-9/11-NSA database in early 2002 the program immediately found the terrorists. This is the story of former Technical director of NSA, Bill Binney, and a program called ThinThread.
In other words: It's a documentary about the the possibility to avoid the attacks of 11 Sepember on the Twin Towers and why it hadn't been applicated. It's a film about a small group of specialist, working for the USA, who got declared and attacked as enemies of the state, when they started inform the parlament and the public, was is going along inside the NSA. It's a film about worldwide obseravtion systems and what they effectly observe. It's a film about the border line situation of democracy and western civilisations based of individual choice and souveranity and their programed disparation...