The original documents – published by the Guardian and the Washington Post – revealed that the NSA claims backdoor access into the servers of Google and other social media companies, and grabs phone records. But it does provide new and scary technical detail. Dark Mirror doesn’t alter what we have known since 2013: that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ routinely sweep up virtually all of our communications.

He has spent the time well – delving into some of the more abstruse programmes from the Snowden archive, and talking to sources from the tech and security worlds. Gellman has waited seven years to give his version. The whistleblower’s own memoir Permanent Record, written from Moscow, was published in September. Snowden’s story has already been told in books, a film and a play. It is a fine and deeply considered portrait of the US-dominated 21st-century surveillance state. He was to be co-recipient of a trove of ultra-secret national security files.ĭark Mirror is Gellman’s account of his interactions with Edward Snowden – a series of lively exchanges, fallings out and making ups. Verax was sizing up Gellman for a job of historic proportions, it turned out. This sounded promising, but how could one be sure? Over the next few months Gellman held a series of encrypted chats with this strange informant, code name Verax.

The correspondent said he could supply documents. It was secretly hoovering up data from hundreds of millions of people. He had news: the NSA or National Security Agency – America’s foremost signals intelligence outfit – had built an unprecedented surveillance machine. The person claimed to be from the US spy community. Poitras told Gellman – a former Washington Post reporter – that a few days earlier a mysterious source had been in touch with her. I n January 2013, the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras asked Barton Gellman if he wanted to grab a coffee.

The black mirror book