Tails Installation

Tails (The Amnesiac Incognito Live System) is a free software operating system—descended from Debian, the universal free software OS—which is designed to provide you with maximum assurance in using the Net incognito. In other words, Tails is an environment you boot into when you want to get as close to anonymity as the current highly surveilled state of the Net allows.

Tails uses TOR, the "onion routing" system for cloaking your identity online. TOR is a network of computers communicating with one another, and with you, over strongly encrypted connections. When your computer is configured correctly to use TOR, all your network traffic is sent over encrypted links from one TOR router to another, hopping across countries and continents, until it emerges from an "exit node" into the public Net. Any website you contact, or any surveilling party in the Net, sees your traffic only once it emerges from the "exit node," hiding its point of origin, and therefore also your identity.

A system using TOR that is incorrectly configured, however, can "leak" your location and identity in many ways that are hard for the user to spot and easy for surveilling entities to take advantage of. So Tails provides a complete and carefully secured operating environment, using GNU/Linux and other free software, on top of which it runs TOR and the "TOR browser bundle" that gives you a Firefox browser that has been carefully configured not to disclose anything about you and not to reveal anything from the "browser fingerprint." Tail also contains the Pidgin multi-platform chat client, which will allow you to create new chat identities for strong pseudonymity in the usual chatty places. Tails also takes care of your operational security at the computer end: when you boot Tails on a computer, the system takes care to leave no sign of your presence behind. Nothing in the computer's memory, whether in RAM or on disk drives, shows that Tails was run on that computer, or what was done with it.

Modes of Installation

Tails could be installed on a laptop or desktop hard drive, but that would leak identity and activity to anyone who physically possessed or seized the computer. So the better ways to run Tails are from a DVD, or from a USB stick.

Step 1: Download, Verify, and Store Tails

The Tails Installation Assistant will walk you through the process.

Step 2: Boot Tails

Using your choice of personal computing device, boot the USB stick or DVD you created in Step 1. You will boot to a free software OS desktop, connect to a wired network or wifi, and then TOR will attempt to connect you to the onion routing network. Once your TOR connection is made, you can use Firefox to verify that you are apparently browsing from somewhere else in the world. Unlike the CUNIX proxy we made in Tech Project 2, there should be no way for any party to verify your location and/or identity. You are not merely proxied, you are cloaked.

Step 3: Proof

Once you have successfully brought up TOR, you are ready to demonstrate your success here. As in Tech Project 2, simply add a comment to this page saying that you are finished. The comment will look no different to you but the logs for this website, like the logs of every website, will record your IP address. If you are successfully using TOR—which you will already have verified for yourself by taking the "TOR test" in your browser at startup&mdash, our logs will show that you came from a TOR "exit node" somewhere in the world. Otherwise we will see exactly where else you are connecting from.

-- EbenMoglen - 20 Apr 2016

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