"Can
you hear me now?"
This
was the first tweet from Edward Snowden which quickly gathered thousands of
followers. And guess who he is following, just one user - His old company the
US National Security Agency (NSA).
He
is believed to be living in Russia since June 2013, as he leaked details about
the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs in May 2013.
In
his second tweet - a reply to US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson - Mr
Snowden joked: "Now we've got water on Mars! Do you think they check
passports at the border? Asking for a friend."
And
in another tweet he said: "Hero, traitor - I'm just a citizen with a
voice."
The
@Snowden account was verified by Twitter and within nine hours of joining, Mr
Snowden had accumulated more than 710,000 followers. In
his Twitter profile, Snowden described himself by saying, “I used to work for
the government. Now I work for the public.”