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A Good American

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a public screening of a movie called «A Good American» by Friedrich Moser.

The main focus of this documentary is the pre-9/11 NSA intelligence. Management decided to cancel an elegant, efficient, privacy-aware, internal data collecting and extracting system called »ThinThread« and replaced it with an inefficient multi-billion Dollar system that was implemented by external companies. The small team operating »ThinThread« is absolutely sure that they would have found evidence for 9/11 before the tragic events took place.

This movie proves that the NSA deliberately replaced a fully working, rather cheap system with a much much bigger system that could not prove any use probably until today. Making money was more important than finding the bad guys.

«A Good American» has at least the same explosive content as «Citizenfour» has: brave whistle-blowers that openly speak about really big mistakes of the officials, causing massive problems to billions and even death to too many people. Unlike «Citizenfour», the movie by Friedrich Moser highlights the story how this horrible situation was created prior to the 9/11-attacks.

After the movie, we had a lively discussion with Friedrich Moser who gave us very interesting insight to the making of the movie, things he was able to dig up but he could not mention in the final movie, and so much more. What a great event!

Unfortunately, despite announcements at our University, there were only fourty students. As I already stated elsewhere, I do think that even tech-savvy people more and more do not care about political issues, the erosion of our privacy, total mass-surveillance, and so forth. What a pity for the next generation(s).

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