‘Privacy Conscious’ Linux Distro Tails Out of Beta Status

The privacy-conscious Linux distribution The Amnesic Incognito Live System, or Tails for short, left beta on Thursday after nearly five years of development. The operating system, which includes NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is now stable enough, according to the developers.

The developers have been working on the Debian-based Linux distribution, then called Amnesia, since 2009. Tails is characterized by an emphasis on protecting privacy and anonymity and works from a DVD, SD card or USB stick. The operating system therefore does not have to be installed on a computer, so it leaves no traces on the system it runs on.

Tails sends all outgoing connections via Tor by default and also blocks non-anonymous connections. Furthermore, conversations in the chat program Pidgin, for example, are encrypted via OTR and the mail program Claws works with GnuPG as standard.

It took nearly five years to shake off beta status, as developers have spent the past few years working on issues they believe are “essential to security and usability,” they write. One of those things is the so-called Tails Upgrader. It checks every time a live system is running, whether there are updates for the operating system. He then downloads the program via Tor and automatically installs it on, for example, a USB stick, which already contains Tails. This way you don’t have to put anything on the computer first.

Tails was originally designed as a routing project by the US Naval Research Laboratory. Since the project was picked up by the community, journalist Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower Edward Snowden, among others, have used the Linux distribution for the NSA disclosures.