The best codebreaker the US ever had after the end of the cold war takes up the challenge of the digital age. He developes a tool that can pick up every electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets, render results in real-time and still keep the privacy as demanded by law. This tool is just perfect - except for one thing: it is way too cheap. So it is dumped by the NSA leadership - on August 20th, 2001. A month after 9/11 a friend of the protagonist does a test-run against the pre-9/11-database. The program finds everything: perpetrators, targets, code-names and connections. This is the extra-ordinary story of the former Technical Director of NSA, Bill Binney, and a program called ThinThread.