A Good American

We are all part of the “mass” in “mass surveillance”.

Screening of the movie +deejays

The second last Doc Lounge night of the season will feature A Good American, a documentary on ex-NSA William Binney and the ThinThread program.

We are all part of the “mass” in “mass surveillance”. It affects us all.It is now more than two years after Snowden and nothing is moving forward, while the Internet of Things (IOT) is around the corner and the current surveillance regime will allow for horrendous abuses and intrusion. In A Good American, it is revealed that mass surveillance is dangerous. Not only does it abuse our right to liberty in a democracy, but a deluge of data has led to intelligence becoming slow and unmanageable for real time threats. However, there is a solution to this problem out there that provides liberty AND security - currently we haven’t got either.

A GOOD AMERICAN on the one hand is a character study, on the other hand it is the story of the alternative to mass surveillance - an alternative that, technologically speaking, has been around since November 2000, but got killed by NSA because it was so efficient and cheap that it would have basically ruined the surveillance industry around NSA and its foreign partner agencies. The killing of this alternative got covered up, just like the investigation of the US Department of Defense Inspector General into it got classified. The proven key to a more secure and freer world remained in the dark. This is the first time that the full story of the secret ThinThread programme has been revealed.

After the movie deejays will play electronic music off of computers.

Bugs is presented in collaboration with Moving Docs - a EDN initiative supported by Creative Europe, with the aim to create innovative outreach strategies and provide opportunities for urban and rural European audiences to enjoy regular screenings of documentary films through a wide variety of media and platforms.