Culture

Edward Snowden Just Got Twitter And Is Already Being Immensely Sassy About It

He's following the NSA, and only the NSA. Perfect.

by Alex McKinnon  30 September 2015

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NSA whistleblower turned digital rights campaigner Edward Snowden is pretty wary about putting information about himself online, which is fairly understandable. If you were wanted by the US government for exposing their massive global surveillance apparatus and lived in permanent exile in Russia at the debatable hospitality of Vladimir Putin, you’d be a bit hesitant about getting a smartphone with GPS tracking capability too.

But either old Ed’s decided to let his hair down a bit or he’s invented an untraceable phone out of a pack of chewing gum and an old car battery, because about ten hours ago his official Twitter account went live.

Snowden’s only sent a handful of tweets, but he already seems to have the requisite levels of snark needed to do pretty well in the PR stakes. For one, the only other account he follows so far is the one belonging to the NSA, his former employer and the huge government organisation dedicated to tracking him down and locking him up for roughly the next 800 years. It remains to be seen if they’ll follow Snowden back, as they do in every other aspect of his existence.

He’s also managed to have a fun chat with popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who invited Snowden on his podcast Star Talk a couple of weeks ago and is solidly on Team Snowden in general.

He’s also engaging with less high-profile people, including Twitter’s innumerable furious, anonymous egg trolls, and being extremely sassy about it in a polite sort of way.

However this plays out, it’s going to be fun to watch. Hopefully he’s around to tweet for a long while.