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, who had fallen into the hands of industry, dumped it - three weeks prior to 9/11. In a secret test-run of the program against the pre-9/11-NSA database in early 2002 the program immediately found the terrorists. 　　译文(2): 《一个好美国人》讲述了美国有史以来最好的密码破译者的故事，以及他和美国国家安全局的一个小团队是如何创造出一种监控工具的，这种工具可以接收地球上的任何电子信号，过滤它的目标，并提供实时结果，同时保持美国宪法所要求的隐私。这个工具是完美的——除了一件事: 它太便宜了。因此，美国国家安全局的领导层落入了工业界的手中，在9/11事件发生的三周前抛弃了它。在2002年初对911之前的 NSA 数据库进行的一次秘密测试中，该程序立即找到了恐怖分子。