A Good American (2015)

I read the following description before watching this documentary and it really piqued my interest:

""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."

I saw no evidence their system could magically pick up any electronic signal in the world.

As someone with a technical background I saw nothing more than network packet sniffing.

The so called "graph" or sphere with trillions of connections was an interesting concept but seems implausible and there was no detail on how they were compiling, storing and querying this data. The whole film seemed to lack any detail and therefore felt dull and unimpressive.

In fact the most interesting part I paused the screen to look at was a totally basic flow chart outlining a vague data capture process that essentially said "if the user is American, do nothing, otherwise log details". Hardly groundbreaking research.

Most of the "experts" were pretty unconvincing. The main protagonist kept referring to the software developers as "the computer guys", like he'd never seen a computer before in his life.