Bill Binney is not a household name. He probably should be, though. If you’ve seen The Good American documentary, you know exactly why his face—and his story—haunts the fringes of the American intelligence conversation. It’s a 2015 film directed by Friedrich Moser, and honestly, it’s one of those rare pieces of media that gets more relevant the older it gets.
Most people think of Edward Snowden when they think of whistleblowers. They think of the dramatic flight to Hong Kong. But Binney was the precursor. He was the guy inside the NSA who actually built the system that could have changed everything without destroying our privacy. Then he watched as the government chose the darker path.
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What actually happened with ThinThread?
The heart of The Good American documentary is a program called ThinThread. In the late 1990s, Binney and a small team of geniuses at the NSA developed this tool. It was elegant. It was efficient. Most importantly, it was legal.
ThinThread was designed to find patterns in massive amounts of data—what we now call "Big Data"—without violating the Fourth Amendment. It encrypted the identities of U.S. citizens. If the system flagged a legitimate threat, only then could a judge issue a warrant to decrypt the personal details.
It worked.
In tests, it was scarily good at connecting the dots. But just weeks before 9/11, the NSA leadership killed it. Why? Well, the film suggests a mix of bureaucratic ego and a preference for a much more expensive, much more intrusive program called Trailblazer.
Trailblazer was a disaster. It cost billions. It didn't work. While the NSA was busy pouring money into that sinkhole, the signals that could have potentially stopped the September 11th attacks were buried in the noise.
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The cost of being right
Binney is a fascinating subject because he isn't some rebellious kid. He was a high-level Soviet specialist. A mathematician. A patriot. Watching him talk in the film is sort of heartbreaking because you can see the technical precision of his mind battling with the moral weight of what he knows.
When 9/11 happened, the NSA didn't go back to the ethical, encrypted version of ThinThread. Instead, they took the "harvesting" technology Binney built and stripped out the privacy protections. They turned the tool inward.
The documentary doesn't just rely on Binney’s word. Moser brings in other heavy hitters like J. Kirk Wiebe and Diane Roark. These aren't conspiracy theorists. Roark was a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee. She saw the budgets. She saw the failures.
There’s a specific scene in The Good American documentary that sticks with you: the FBI raid. Binney describes being in his shower when the FBI burst into his home, pointing guns at him and his family. This was the reward for trying to report waste and fraud through the "proper channels."
Surveillance isn't just about "bad guys" anymore
The film forces you to confront a weird reality. Most of us have accepted that our data is being tracked by Google or Meta. We've grown numb to it. But The Good American documentary reminds us that this wasn't an inevitable evolution of technology. It was a choice.
We chose a system of mass surveillance over a system of targeted, encrypted analysis.
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One of the most nuanced points the film makes is about "The Noise." When you collect everything, you see nothing. By vacuuming up every email and every phone call, the intelligence community actually made it harder to find the needles in the haystack. They just built a bigger haystack.
Why you should actually care in 2026
Is it a "fun" watch? Not really. It’s dense. It’s technical in spots. It’s frustrating. But it’s essential because it reframes the entire debate around national security.
People often argue that we have to trade privacy for safety. Binney’s entire career proves that is a false choice. We could have had both. We had the code.
If you're looking for a flashy Hollywood thriller, this isn't it. It’s a slow burn. It’s a series of interviews and archival footage that builds a terrifying picture of how bureaucracy can override common sense and the law.
Actionable ways to engage with the data privacy conversation
Watching the film usually leaves people feeling a bit powerless. You can't go back to 2001 and flip the switch on ThinThread. But you can change how you exist online today.
- Audit your "Metadata": Understand that it’s not just the content of your messages that matters, but who you talk to, for how long, and from where. This is what Binney was trying to protect.
- Support Privacy-First Tools: Use end-to-end encrypted messaging like Signal. Use browsers that don't track your every move. These tools are the spiritual successors to the encryption protocols Binney championed.
- Read the official reports: If you think the documentary is biased, look up the 2004 NSA Inspector General report on ThinThread and Trailblazer. Much of it is still redacted, but the parts that aren't confirm the core of Binney's story: a working system was scrapped for a failing one.
- Follow the legislative trail: Pay attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) when it comes up for renewal. This is the modern legal battleground for the issues raised in the film.
The reality is that The Good American documentary isn't really about the past. It's a blueprint for understanding the present. It shows us that the technology to protect us without spying on us has existed for decades. We just have to demand that it gets used.