Chelsea Manning joins Twitter

Chelsea Manning, the Army private serving time in federal prison for providing sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, is now posting indirectly to a Twitter account.

“It is her. She’s obviously not tweeting directly, but it is her,” Nancy Hollander, one of the lawyers handling Manning’s appeal, said on Friday.

The first message from the account — @xychelsea — was sent mid-day on Friday.

{mosads}“I’m hoping to stay connected w/ this account as much as poss., but would rather tweet about more meaningful things than not,” Manning tweeted Friday.

“Tweeting from prison reqs a lot of effort and using a voice phone to dictate,” she said, adding the hashtag #90sproblems.

I’m hoping to stay connected w/ this account as much as poss., but would rather tweet about more meaningful things than not #lessismore

— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015

Tweeting from prison reqs a lot of effort and using a voice phone to dictate #90sproblems

— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) April 3, 2015

It was not immediately clear to whom she was dictating the messages. People incarcerated at the maximum-security military penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., do not have Internet access.

Manning, who was tried under the name Bradley Manning and came out as transgender after her trial, was sentenced to 35 years in the facility after she was found guilty of having leaked the sensitive documents to the transparency organization WikiLeaks. The documents provided an unvarnished look at the U.S. War in Iraq and its diplomacy abroad. 

She has raised her profile in recent months. In September, she wrote an op-ed for The Guardian criticizing the U.S. policy toward the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.