Chelsea Manning Tweets From Behind Bars

Chelsea Manning may be in prison, but she's communicating with the world at up to 140 characters a time. Yep, Manning is on Twitter while serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, USA Today reports. What's more, she's got 40,000 followers at @xychelsea as of this writing. "Tweeting from prison reqs a lot of effort and using a voice phone to dictate #90sproblems," she tweeted on Friday, her first Twitter day. Among her other missives:

• "Starting with a shout out to the friends who have always stood by me @ggreenwald@amnesty@carwinb@savemanning and so many others #thankyou."
• "For those of you asking: I plan to tweet as freq. as possible; daily to weekly."
• "That's all the tweets I have for today! Thank you all for your love and support. I hope you will continue to follow me in the future."

Manning's Twitter feed includes a drawing of her "as she would like to be seen, with long hair," a look that military authorities have forbidden, reports the Guardian. The newspaper notes that Manning did, however, win her legal battle to undergo gender-reassignment hormone therapy—a first for a member serving actively in the armed services. (More Twitter stories.)