- How did you do it? How did you extract all that information and cross a border with it? - It's just a question of being smarter than the adversarya. You can tell that story later. Barton Gellman's informant called himself Verax' u the truthteller. It was only later that Verax was unmasked as Edward Snowden, and by that point he had already shared thousands of files with Gellman. Dark Mirror is the story of what happened next. For Gellman, Snowden's revelations were only the beginning of his work as an investigative journalist, and he began to dig deeper, to piece together the master narrative that reveals the complete story, a story many years in the telling. In uncovering this hidden network Gellman found himself under attack, beginning with the discovery of his own name on a file in the NSA document trove. Then, Google notified him that a foreign government was trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser found anomalies on his laptop. As he fought to make the truth known, Gellman became embroiled in an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries, eventually forcing him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense.