Edward Snowden joins Twitter

National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has joined Twitter.

“Can you hear me now?” the former NSA contractor tweeted Tuesday morning.

“I used to work for the government,” Snowden’s official biography states. “Now I work for the people.”

The American fugitive is following exactly one account on Twitter: the NSA.

Snowden fled the U.S. in 2013 after publicly leaking information on the NSA’s warrantless collection of individuals’ phone metadata. He resides in Russia, where he has repeatedly criticized America’s intelligence community.

{mosads}Snowden has more than 101,000 followers after posting his first tweet less than an hour ago. His debut message also presently boasts 18,000 re-tweets and 14,000 favorites.

Snowden’s new social media profile lists him as the director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The group’s website says that it is “dedicated to helping support and defend public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption and law-breaking in government.

“Freedom of the Press Foundation is built on the recognition that this kind of transparency journalism — from publishing the Pentagon Papers and exposing Watergate, to uncovering the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons — doesn’t just happen,” it says.

“It requires dogged work by journalists, and often, the courage of whistleblowers and others who work to ensure that the public actually learns what it has a right to know.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation’s website also states that it advocates for greater privacy protections between journalists and potential whistleblowers.

Snowden is now a vocal critic of limiting human and online rights worldwide.

“This drive that we see in the Russian government to control more and more the Internet, to control more and more what people are seeing, even parts of personal lives, deciding what is the appropriate or inappropriate way for people to express their love for one another…[is] fundamentally wrong,” he said on Sept. 5.

Snowden’s new Twitter profile is already drawing attention from his detractors.

“Some say you have courage, I saw courage on #Sept11,” GOP White House candidate and former New York Gov. George Pataki tweeted at Snowden. “You are just a traitor who put American lives at risk.”