The US Central Intelligence Agency joined Twitter, Friday and gathered over 60,000 followers in the first hour of joining the popular micro-blogging site.
The inaugural message from the spy agency was quite cheeky but very expected. The message, a joking reference to a "Glomar response," was re-tweeted 50,000 times in the first hour of being posted. The current number of retweets for the first tweet from the official CIA account is more than 190,000 times and has more than 110,000 favorites.
"We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet," reads the first tweet from the CIA Twitter account.
After joining the site, the agency released a statement, Friday, saying it will be using the "social media expansion" for sharing Throwback Thursday photos, agency updates and fun facts about the organization.
This is not the first time CIA has featured its online presence. The U.S. spy organization already has a public website and a site for mobile users at CIA.gov. Besides, the agency is active on other social sites with official accounts on photo-sharing site Flickr and online video-streaming website YouTube. In Friday's statement, CIA also promised enhancements of the CIA.gov website and live-streaming capabilities via Ustream, which will be added in the coming weeks.
According to CIA's Twitter profile description, the secretive government agency describes itself as the nation's first line of defense and has been successful in the past because it does what no nation has ever done and goes where others can not.
The Glomar response, as used in the first CIA tweet, was popularized in 1975, after a reporter started digging around CIA operations that attempted salvaging of a sunken Russian submarine and then accused the agency for keeping the salvaging under wraps. To this the CIA replied that it would "neither confirm nor deny" the project.
We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.
— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014
Earlier this week, the CIA extended its online presence by joining Facebook. According to media reports, the agency's decision to join the world's largest social networking site is an attempt to lighten the agency's profile on the Internet.
"By expanding to these platforms (Facebook and Twitter), CIA will be able to more directly engage with the public and provide information on CIA's mission, history, and other developments," CIA Director John Brennan said in a statement, according to IB Times.
CIA's attempt to rebuild its image by connecting with people through social networking sites may have its own consequences. While the agency is known for its secretive operations and heightened security, it remains unclear how well it can protect its accounts from the hands of notorious hackers that have traditionally took over accounts of various news publications to send false tweets. But considering it's the CIA, few extra codes and layers of protection might already be in place.
