Only a super-secure operating system could have helped Edward Snowden, communicate with his collaborators, away from all those prying eyes at the NSA. Meet Tails, an operating system that fits all these requirements to the T. Running on the open-source Linux software this OS leaves no trace of you on the internet. The developers behind it remain anonymous to protect it from government interference.
How it works?
Tails is a version of Linux optimized for anonymity.It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer’s original operating system.
The package comes with several privacy and encryption tools the most notable one being Tor (which stands for The Onion Router), an application that makes a user’s internet traffic anonymous by routing it through a network of computers run by volunteers around the world. Once Tails is installed from the driver, Tor runs automatically after usage of which one can return to the computers original OS and there remains no history of the Tails session.
The Tails team says that the usage of this OS doesn’t depend or alter the current OS installed on the system and once it is shut down the system will boot on its usual OS.
Apart from Tor there are other encryption tools such as GPG, the password encryption tool KeePassX and the chat encryption tool Off-The-Record. The productivity tools included in the package are OpenOffice for desktop publishing, Audacity for editing music files and GIMP for image editing.
Why “THEY” used it?
Whistle-blower Snowden and his journalist collaborators are said to have used this particular operating system because of the fact that it does not store data locally.The only storage space used by Tails is the RAM, which is automatically erased when the computer shuts down. This feature makes the computer, on which it is being used, immune to defective software and the forensics that it might undergo later in point of time.
Development of Tails
The developers of Tails initially called their project Amnesia and based it on Incognito, an already existent operating system. Both these projects were soon merged to form TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System). The Tails team, on the need for developing such an OS, says,
“The masters of today’s Internet, namely the marketing giants like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, and the spying agencies, really want our lives to be more and more transparent online, and this is only for their own benefit. So trying to counterbalance this tendency seems like a logical position for people developing an operating system that defends privacy and anonymity online.”
The group also mentions that Tails began five years ago saying,
“At that time some of us were already Tor enthusiasts and had been involved in free software communities for years. But we felt that something was missing to the panorama: a toolbox that would bring all the essential privacy enhancing technologies together and made them ready to use and accessible to a larger public.”
Though the core team is still focusing on developing the OS for desktops and laptops sources say that there is a separate team that is developing a version that would be supported on mobile device running Android and Ubuntu, and boot up the system from a microSD card, provided the user has root access.
The Limitations
Though Tails might seem to be the perfect operating system to remain anonymous on the internet no software or privacy promises full protection in all situations. It might not make a good day to day usage operating system due to the fact that one is definitely going to use an application, over a course of time, that requires personal credentials thereby blowing up the cover up.
Tails has been crucially designed to be used only for specific activities that needs one to remain anonymous. The development team is supposedly working on other security issues too that have been mentioned in the site documentation.