Make it Easy to "Do the Right Thing" with TAILS

Computer security is unpleasant. It's inconvenient. It's confusing. It makes your life harder, prevents you from accessing what you want when you need it, and requires being very thoughtful and careful at all times. All together, it's no wonder that so many people don't do what they should even when they know it's the right thing to do. You have to make choices to keep yourself safe and anonymous, and we all go with the easy default settings at times, or slip up occasionally.

What we really need is a system that makes people Do the Right Thing without taking any special, onerous action. 

Enter TAILS: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System.

Let's break that one down.

• The (English definite article) 
• Amnesiac means that (unless you configure it otherwise - more on that later) the system will reset itself to a base state.
• Incognito is for the fact that all of your traffic is routed through Tor, The Onion Router and the world's best anonymization and circumvention system.
• Live is the term for an operating system that boots off of a CD or USB.
• System. Defining this term is left as an exercise for the reader.

So you take a USB that's at least 4 GB, install TAILS, figure out how to access your BIOS and set it to boot from USB rather than your hard drive, and you're off to the races. TAILS was built by a bunch of delightfully paranoid folks who have done the hard work of securing a system so you don't need to. You're Doing the Right Thing by default.

For those of you used to some flavor of *NIX, you're going to feel right at home in TAILS land. For a Mac or Windows user, there's a tiny bit of a learning curve, but it's not hard. TAILS comes bundled with the OpenOffice suite, so you can spreadsheetify or wordprocess to your heart's content. 

First, the biggest threat for most folks is viruses and malware, which *NIX just doesn't get. (Ok, so there was that one time.) More than that, the fact that the system reverts its operating system to initial state every time you reboot, so it's the equivalent of reinstalling Windows whenever the system turns on. 

These days it's all about the browser; for me 90% of my professional and personal life can be quite comfortably done through a web window. TAILS comes with IceWeasel**, a rebranded Firefox with a lot of privacy and security customizations built in. Since all your traffic is routed through the Tor network, you are mostly anonymous and (first-step) encrypted. They give you an anonymized search engine that routes to Google without forking over your lucrative personal info. There's a scripting blocker. Etc, etc. Pretty slick.

Since it's a live system, you can effectively carry your computing environment in your pocket. Pretty convenient.

Thanks to some funding from a generous outside donor, TAILS added a great new feature: persistence. There's a lot of things you'd like to save on your local system while they're in progress, things like PGP keys, password vaults, etc. With persistence you can store such information in a secure, locked box. Now you've broken the A in the name - it now knows something about you and you could potentially be forced to open it up.

It's been a great experience working with TAILS. We're trying to put it into the hands of as many people as possible in our digital security trainings with hope they will then share it with others. They may not be able to pass on everything important to know about security, but we can be confident that all these new TAILS users will be doing the right thing anyway.

**The name is an allusion to a fictional Nietzsche quote made up by Matt Groening: "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."