Snowden Joins Twitter, Follows NSA

wiredmikey writes: Edward Snowden joined Twitter Tuesday, picking up more than a quarter of a million followers on the social network in just over two hours. Snowden followed a single Twitter account: the U.S. National Security Agency, from which he stole electronic documents revealing the agency's secret surveillance programs. "Can you hear me now?" he asked in his first tweet, which was quickly resent by Twitter users tens of thousands of times. In his second, Snowden noted the recent news about the planet Mars and then quipped about the difficulty he had finding asylum after the U.S. government fingered him as the source of the NSA leaks. "And now we have water on Mars!" he wrote. "Do you think they check passports at the border? Asking for a friend."

Comments

Re:At least he still has a sense of humor

[Yunzil]

If the illegal practices are classified, then exposing them is illegal.

Re:At least he still has a sense of humor

[Anonymous Coward]

He exposed national security secrets. The fact that they were illegal actions by our government does not change the fact that exposing those secret practices is textbook treason. There is no legal way to expose national security tidbits like that.

Not really true. From Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information :

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations.
(a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

So, in fact, hiding government wrongdoing by classifying it is in itself illegal, and the material would be considered improperly classified.