The @snowden account was confirmed by The Intercept, the media outlet founded by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the NSA leaks.
He got into tweeting with a simple tweet: “Can you hear me now?”
Can you hear me now?
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
The Twitter account emerges just a few days after a two-part interview that Snowden did with Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which the famed astrophysicist asked him why he hasn’t joined Twitter yet.
“You kind of need a Twitter handle. So like @Snowden, maybe? Is this something you might do?” Tyson had remarked. To which Snowden agreed: “That sounds good, I think we’ve got to make it happen.”
The @snowden Twitter handle had actually already been registered but the user agreed to hand it over when Twitter contacted them. Snowden himself will be manning the account, says his lawyer ACLU’s Ben Wizner.
Snowden has been holed up in Russia for the past two years after leaking troves of sensitive NSA data that revealed mass online and phone surveillance at the hands of the US government. Despite being stuck in Russia, Snowden continues to grant interviews, often with journalists who travel to Moscow or via video link at several conferences around the globe.
Now with his new trusty Twitter account, the thoughts of the man considered the face of online privacy are only a tweet away.
