Hacker Cinema
A Good American
2015 · Film · documentary · 100 min
Directed by Friedrich Moser
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.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
This issue/corruption is addressed in https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015
Watch "A Good American" (doco) and let me know if "the govt" (parts thereof) have citizen's best interests at heart.
AI in the wrong hands (MIC) has been a warning in countless films. Competing with China's Military by weaponizing AI is not the solution to a problem. It's "becoming what you fear".
We've seen SV employees protest the moves their corporations are making (facial recog, lethal robotics, etc) so Eric taking this out of Google into "startups" is really skirting around the perception issue (ie. PR of doing "evil").
Ah, maybe not. Watch the film "A Good American". It's out on Netflix.
People are people. Govt employees can have agendas that are bad for the rest of us just like contractors.
> The paradox is many people feel the US government should have done more about 9/11 or other such events.
Certainly. After all, they chose money instead of keeping the one tool[1] they already had that were able to tell them about 9/11 before it happened and save all those people who have died in 9/11 and other attacks. Negligence is complicity when it's a government choosing money over it's citizens, so in the case of 9/11, I'd say the US government is as guilty as the attackers.
A great documentary about NSA and ThinThread is A Good American[2], and a good follow-up is The Maze[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
[2]: http://agoodamerican.org
[3]: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/themaze