This documentary places the U.S. intelligence community's failure to thwart the 9/11 attacks into the context of that community's attempts since WW2 to grapple with "Big Data," the ever-growing cache of data created in the digital world. The film is not overtly political, which some will appreciate, and others not.
The irony here is that a film about overwhelming data is quite short on the details. There is little explanation as to how the subjects' data-collection system, ThinThread, actually worked and the sorts of meaning-making it undertook. There are no examples as to the significant results of analyzing metadata. I don't mean to say the film was overly dumbed-down for those without knowledge of software development, coding, or cryptanalysis. To the contrary, the subjects would make a few highly technical yet vague statements about their project, then move on.
Ultimately, the subject matter is riveting and infuriating, and I bet anyone watching this will be driven to do further research on ThinThread and the NSA and DoD's scandalous treatment of it before and after 9/11. Yet the documentary's vagueness--and relative lack of follow-through about attempts to reveal this scandal to the public--leave the film feeling like conspiracy theory rather than investigative reporting or whistleblowing.
