Documentary, A Good American - we could've known about 9/11

[Thebobo]

Maybe some of you have known about this but I haven't. Just watched this documentary this morning, enjoyable but frustrating. It's a sad insight into the intelligence operation at the NSA General Hayden oversaw. The very first part will give you a hint of the revelations that the rest of the documentary uncovers. I would comment more but you should see it first. A lot of new revelations for me and no it's not some 9/11 conspiracy documentary these are real ex NSA people putting themselves on the line in the film. It's on Netflix and others.

IMDB summary.

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.

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbVfub-L5Rs

 

[kage69]

Ahh, the days of Kindasleazy Rice telling Clarke, sorry, it's inappropriate for the foremost authority on US counter terrorism to speak to the President about...counter terrorism. The days when a president could be handed a memo stating "OBL determined to strike US mainland" and dismiss it as 'ass-covering' so he could get back to that puzzle he almost had finished.

Salad Days.

 

[FIVR]

Ahh, the days of Kindasleazy Rice telling Clarke, sorry, it's inappropriate for the foremost authority on US counter terrorism to speak to the President about...counter terrorism. The days when a president could be handed a memo stating "OBL determined to strike US mainland" and dismiss it as 'ass-covering' so he could get back to that puzzle he almost had finished.

Salad Days.

Those were "the good old days" when we still had competent people in the US government making real decisions that changed policy.


If you think things were bad then, I can't imagine how much worse the Trump whitehouse would handle the same problem.


If you really want to scare yourself, now imagine the difference in capability to hurt US interests that some Saudi millionaire living in Sudan and running fairly small organization had vs Kim Jong Un.

 

[Fenixgoon]

there have been several news reports/interviews/documentaries with the folks involved with thin thread and other intelligence gathering tools, IIRC. they became whistle blowers and were more or less harassed by the USG for it (as i recall, the constant legal threads and raids basically destroyed their lives).

 

[Perknose]

I'm somewhat ashamed to know I did not know this. I'll be watching this soon. Thanks OP!