 [Daily Mail, where America gets its news] ...says investigative journalist who exposed classified documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden - Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden shared thousands of classified documents about US surveillance programs with journalist Barton Gellman in 2013
- One of those documents revealed that the NSA was tracking phone calls made by Americans inside the US
- In an excerpt from his new book, Dark Mirror, Gellman lays out how the tool at the heart of the program works in unprecedented detail
- The tool, Mainway, secretly scoured billions of phone records a day for years
- It cultivated a database that was 'preconfigured to map anyone's life at the touch of a button', Gellman writes
- The program was scaled back significantly in the wake of the Snowden leak, but a more restrained version is still in effect today
- Though the NSA insists that the database is only used to investigate terrorists, Gellman raises concerns about how easily it could be abused
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