A Good American
March 16th, 2016

Courtesy of Faceboook:

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, which had fallen into the hands of industry, dumped it – three weeks prior to 9/11. Now guess what…

Tidbits:

• DOC NYC – 2015

courtesy of blue+green:

Friedrich Moser 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 and editor in Bolzano-Bozen / Italy. In 2001 he founded blue+green communication. He has made over 20 documentaries in the past years, most of them as producer / director / DoP. In 2008 he attended successfully the Documentary Campus, the European Masterschool for non-fiction filmmaking.

Friedrich’s professional career also includes lecturing on history and 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 lives in Vienna/Austria and in Bressanone-Brixen / Italy.

Filmography:

• How to Build a Truth Engine (2021)
• Money Bots (2020)
• BEER! A Love Story (2019)
• The Maze (2017)
• A Good American (2016)
• The Brussels Business (2012)

Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:

• 3/8/16 – Buffalo’s alt-publication Artvoice focuses their cover story on A Good American – link
• 3/9/16 – Need a primer on William Binney (subject of our upcoming film A Good American)? Start with The Program, a The New York Times Op-Docs short on the former NSA technical director by the Oscar winning director/Pultizer Prize winning journalist Laura Poitras – link
• 3/14/16 – “With the ferociously intelligent and committed Binney at its centre, the film is a fascinating, sometimes jaw-dropping account of gifted individuals thwarted by self-serving superiors, with tragic results. […] In a tragic way, the latest atrocity makes the documentary A Good American even more timely. […] For many it will make upsetting viewing.” Friedrich Moser interviewed at Indiewire – link
• 3/15/16 – From Buffalo critic M. Faust online at The Public: “A Good American – Should our security agencies have known in advance about the attacks of 9/11? That’s the question that will bring most viewers to this new documentary (playing in Buffalo ahead of most anyplace else in the US), but they’ll walk away with a deeper disrespect for the NSA, which is presented here as so corrupted by greed and arrogance as to be worthless. The center of the film is former analyst William Binney, who developed in the 1990s the ability to predict events using metadata. But because the intelligence agencies couldn’t make enough money from his system, ThinThread, they jettisoned his work in favor of a much more expensive program that eventually proved useless. It’s damning stuff, if you can take it at face value: director Friedrich Moser’s approach is slow and deliberative but also emotionally manipulative and one-sided. Still, he presents a case that demands to be addressed. Sponsored by Cultivate Cinema, the screening is free and open to the public.”