‘Can you hear me now?’: Edward Snowden joins Twitter, gets 10 times more followers than NSA

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower and fugitive who exposed the mass-surveillance practices at the US National Security Agency, is now on Twitter, and he already has way more Twitter followers than the NSA.

His account, which has been verified by Twitter as authentic, isn’t hard to find: It’s @Snowden. His attorney, Ben Wizner, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, confirmed that Snowden himself controls the account.

“Can you hear me now?” was his first tweet.

Snowden gained almost 300,000 followers in less than two hours after he tweeted his first message Tuesday morning - a cheeky swipe at his former employer, the NSA, whose account only has 76,000 followers. The NSA is also the only Twitter account that Snowden follows.