Post-9/11 America builds a surveillance apparatus in plain sight, and this film traces how it happened. It starts with the Total Information Awareness program, a Pentagon effort run through DARPA to mine data on ordinary citizens for signs of terrorism, built with help from private contractors like Narus. Public backlash killed the program's name, but the film argues its methods survived elsewhere, landing on Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician who came forward with documents describing a secret room in the company's San Francisco facility where the NSA tapped directly into internet traffic. Klein's account anchors the film's case that ordinary Americans' communications were being copied and analyzed on a mass scale, not just those of suspected terrorists. Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates walk through how the USA PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were stretched to authorize this, turning laws meant to target foreign threats into cover for domestic collection. The film treats Klein's whistleblowing as the hinge where a hidden program became a documented one.