'Can you hear me now?' - Edward Snowden joins Twitter

Edward Snowden is verified with a blue checkmark and everything. And as of posting, Snowden follows only one Twitter account: The NSA. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Edward Snowden, the source behind a slew of revelations about National Security Agency spying programmes in recent years, is now on Twitter and gaining followers fast.

He's verified with a blue checkmark and everything. And as of posting, Snowden follows only one Twitter account: The NSA.

Here's his first tweet - an apparent Verizon Wireless joke and subtle dig at the spy agency: "Can you hear me now?"

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, lives in Russia, where he was granted temporary asylum after revealing himself as the source of the NSA documents to several media outlets, including the Washington Post - and he still faces criminal charges in the United States.

He maintains a pretty high profile - serving on the board of directors for the Freedom of the Press Foundation and making fairly frequent livestreamed appearances.

But other than an account used for question sessions on social sharing site reddit, Snowden has kept a fairly discreet online presence while in exile. He explained why in a recent interview with Fusion's Kashmir Hill:

"One of the big challenges in the situation I'm in is that I have all these opsec routines that I follow. All the web publishing platforms have massive amounts of analytics embedded in them. Facebook, for example, databases how long you're on each page, what posts you click on, what pictures you've seen, and they store this permanently.

"Inevitably someone in a high risk situation like me is going to get owned.

"Exploit codes [could be embedded] into the transactions I'm receiving from a legitimate service and compromise the security of my devices. I've been working for a long time on improving that and creating set-ups that are more robust and survivable when you do get owned. Because inevitably someone in a high risk situation like me is going to get owned. There's nobody good enough to block every attack.

"How do you limit the damage? How do you recover in the wake of a compromise? I've made a lot of strides in that and am looking forward to, hopefully, participating [on social networks] in a more open and active manner in the near future."

It looks like the near future has arrived.