The NSA is the government agency much in the news for spying electronically on everyone on earth. Turns out that is a bad actor both morally and technically. A new documentary suggests the agency is dangerous not because it is too powerful but because it is too incompetent, bureaucratic, corrupt and lawless.

The film is “A Good American” by Austrian film maker Friedrich Moser. The good man of the title is Bill Binney, a longtime NSA wizard whose career demonstrates that a prophet is not without honor except in his own agency.

Binney presided over a small skunkworks team including Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis and abetted by others in government service including Diane Roark and Thomas Drake. The team concluded that the agency was collecting too much data, a huge percentage worthless, which had the perverse effect of making it harder to separate the intelligence wheat from the chaff.

They developed ThinThread, a revolutionary computer program that looked at metadata instead of data. Rather than listen to Aunt Mary’s actual conversations about planting petunias, it looked at the web of connections by phone, email, bank accounts, credit cards, Skype that Aunt Mary was involved in. Long before computer assisted analysis Binney had used the same focus on metadata patterns to forecast the Soviet forays into Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

It turns out this sort of data, the footprints on the electronic sands rather than the actual feet, yields telltale signs with a higher probability of indicating cases of wrong doing than old fashioned interception of billions of phone calls or emails. Thus, the ThinThread technique is a twofer – a better chance of detecting the guilty without invading the privacy of the innocent.

Naturally their work was embraced with tremendous enthusiasm, kept us all safe, and covered the team with honors and the esteem of a grateful nation.

In your dreams.