• Press and media information
 Press and media information
Tails 0.23 herunterladen March 19, 2014
  1. Announcements and press releases
  2. Quick links to better understand Tails
  3. Media appearances
  4. Awards
  5. Conferences
  6. Video
  7. Books

Announcements and press releases

The general purpose announcements that we publish are available either by email or by RSS feed on Tails News. They are mainly meant for Tails users.

We also sometimes publish press releases but they are not archived on the website. Write us an email at tails@boum.org if you want to receive future press releases.

Quick links to better understand Tails

Media appearances

Tails is mentioned regularly in the press and in research papers. This list is not comprehensive, but illustrates some of the significant articles that have been published about Tails.

2014

  • 2014-04-14: In the press conference she held after winning a Polk Award for her reporting on Edward Snowden and the NSA, Laura Poitras said "We just published a blog about a tool that's called Tails, which is a operating system that runs on either USB stick or SD disc, that is a sort of all-in-one encryption tool that you can use for PGP and encryption. And it's just really secure. [...] So, it's a really important tool for journalists."
  • 2014-04-14: Out in the Open: Inside the Operating System Edward Snowden Used to Evade the NSA by Klint Finley, in Wired.
  • 2014-04-02: In Help Support the Little-Known Privacy Tool That Has Been Critical to Journalists Reporting on the NSA by Trevor Timm:
    • Laura Poitras says: "I've been reluctant to go into details about the different steps I took to communicate securely with Snowden to avoid those methods being targeted. Now that Tails gives a green light, I can say it has been an essential tool for reporting the NSA story. It is an all-in-one secure digital communication system (GPG email, OTR chat, Tor web browser, encrypted storage) that is small enough to swallow. I'm very thankful to the Tails developers for building this tool."
    • Glenn Greenwald says: "Tails have been vital to my ability to work securely on the NSA story. The more I've come to learn about communications security, the more central Tails has become to my approach."
    • Barton Gellman says: "Privacy and encryption work, but it's too easy to make a mistake that exposes you. Tails puts the essential tools in one place, with a design that makes it hard to screw them up. I could not have talked to Edward Snowden without this kind of protection. I wish I'd had it years ago."
  • 2014-03-17: In Index Freedom of Expression Awards: Digital activism nominee Tails, Alice Kirkland interviews the Tails project about our nomination for the Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards.
  • 2014-03-13: In his Les 7 clés pour protéger ses communications article (in French) published by the Tribune de Genève, Simon Koch recommends using Tails.
  • 2014-03-12: In his Happy 25th Birthday World Wide Web - Let's Not Destroy It article published by the Huffington Post, Mike Harris writes that "Increasing numbers of activists are using high-tech tools such as Tor or Tails to encrpyt their internet browsing and email".
  • 2014-03-12: In his US and UK Spy Agencies Are "Enemies of the Internet" article, published in the Motherboard section of the Vice network, Joseph Cox covers Reporters Without Borders' latest report, and writes "If you're a journalist working on anything more sensitive than London Fashion Week or League 2 football, you might want to consider using the Linux-based 'Tails' operating system too."
  • 2014-03-08: Reporters Without Borders's Grégoire Pouget blogs about Tails: FIC 2014 : Comment être réellement anonyme sur Internet (in French).
  • 2014-03-04: Tails wins the 2014 Access Innovation Prize, that was focused this year on Endpoint Security.
  • 2014-03-03: In the March edition of the Linux Journal, that celebrates 20 years of this journal, Kyle demonstrates Tails.
  • 2014-02-27: The Daily Dot announced the experiments on porting Tails to mobile devices in "Tor takes anonymity mobile with new smartphone OS" and "Beta testing for Tor's anonymous mobile OS begins this spring". Note that this is not an official project of Tails, see the homepage of the Tomy Detachable Secure Mobile System project for more info.
  • 2014-02-27: In his article "Why It’s Vital For Users to Fund Open-Source Encryption Tools" Trevor Timm from Freedom of the Press Foundation explains that Tails « has been vital for most, if not all, of the NSA journalists. [...] Its prime use case is journalists trying to communicate or work in environments in which they may normally be at risk or compromised. The NSA stories have been the biggest story in journalism in the past decade, yet the tool the reporters rely on is incredibly underfunded, is maintained by only a handful of developers, and operates on a shoestring budget. »
  • 2014-02-07: In his review of uVirtus, Kheops, from Telecomix concludes that « Users should prefer Tails and other mature secure live distributions (such as IprediaOS, Liberté Linux, Privatix and Whonix) over uVirtus since they provide a real safety improvement to the user. For any activity that does not entail transferring large quantities of data (such as video files), there is no strong reason to prefer uVirtus over any of these. »
  • 2014-01-14: On Linux.com, Carla Schroder picks Tails as the best Linux distribution for 2014 in the "Best Fighting the Man Distro" category.
  • 2014-01-07: A RAT in the Registry: The Case for Martus on TAILS explains how Benetech have selected TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) to be the default environment for their use of Martus while defending Tibetan human rights defenders against targeted malware attacks.
  • 2014-01: "Tails: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System – Privacy for Anyone Anywhere", by Russ McRee, in this month's issue of the Information Systems Security Association Journal.

2013

  • 2013-12: Bruce Schneier answered to someone asking him what Linux distribution is its favorite: "I don't use Linux. (Shhh. Don't tell anyone.) Although I have started using Tails".
  • 2013-12-30: Jacob Appelbaum stated at the Chaos Communication Congress: "if you are a journalist and you are not using Tails, you should probably be using Tails, unless you really know what you're doing".
  • 2013-12-12: In A conversation with Bruce Schneier, as part of the "Snowden, the NSA and free software" cycle at Columbia Law School NYC, Bruce Schneier says:
    • "I think most of the public domain privacy tools are going to be safe, yes. I think GPG is going to be safe. I think OTR is going to be safe. I think that Tails is going to be safe. I do think that these systems, because they were not -- you know, the NSA has a big lever when a tool is written closed-source by a for-profit corporation. There are levers they have that they don't have in the open source international, altruistic community. And these are generally written by crypto-paranoids, they're pretty well designed. We make mistakes, but we find them and we correct them, and we're getting good at that. I think that if the NSA is going after these tools, they're going after implementations."
    • "What do I trust? I trust, I trust Tails, I trust GPG [...]"
    • "We can make it harder, we can make it more expensive, we can make it more risky. And yes, every time we do something to increase one of those, we're making ourselves safer. [...] There are tools we are deploying in countries all over the world, that are keeping people alive. Tor is one of them. I mean, Tor saves lives. [...] And every time you use Tor [...] provides cover for everyone else who uses Tor [...]"
  • 2013-11-12: In its review "Which Linux distro is best for protecting your privacy?", techrada.com prefers Tails over 4 other distributions: "The main advantages of Tails are its readiness for USB installation and the complete nature of its desktop and its documentation. The Tails system menu also contains enough applications to make you do almost everything you may need without rebooting. The documentation, while not interesting as the one for Whonix, is more than adequate to help even Linux beginners. Yay for Tails, then!"
  • 2013-11: The German-speaking ADMIN magazine reviews Tails.
  • 2013-10 : (in french) Framablog, Le chiffrement, maintenant, contains a whole chapter about Tails.
  • 2013-10 : SecureDrop, "Aaron Swartz’s unfinished whistleblowing platform" promotes Tails in both user manual and security audit. via Korben.info
  • 2013-10: The occasional issue n°8 of MISC magazine is dedicated to privacy topics. Tails is mentioned a few times.
  • 2013-10-15: CRYPTO-GRAM, October 15, 2013 Bruce Schneier: "One thing I didn't do, although it's worth considering, is use a stateless operating system like Tails. You can configure Tails with a persistent volume to save your data, but no operating system changes are ever saved. Booting Tails from a read-only DVD -- you can keep your data on an encrypted USB stick -- is even more secure. Of course, this is not foolproof, but it greatly reduces the potential avenues for attack."
  • 2013-09-12: In Inside the Effort to Crowdfund NSA-Proof Email and Chat Services by DJ Pangburn, Riseup birds write (about the TBB) "Combined with the TAILS project, which Riseup supports, there is nothing better."
  • 2013-09-05: In How to remain secure against NSA surveillance, Bruce Schneier wrote: "Since I started working with Snowden's documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about."
  • 2013-08-13: (in French) Tails en version 0.20 on LinuxFR
  • 2013-08-12: Anonym und sicher Surfen mit Tails, in the September edition of the LinuxUser magazine, that includes Tails on the accompanying DVD.
  • 2013-08-11: In their DeadDrop/StrongBox Security Assessment, a research group (Alexei Czeskis, David Mah, Omar Sandoval, Ian Smith, Karl Koscher, Jacob Appelbaum, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Bruce Schneier) suggests inserting Tails in the loop of the DeadDrop/StrongBox system. They also write: "We believe that sources should be adviced to use the Tails LiveCD. This provides better anonymity and is easier to use than the Tor Browser bundle."
  • 2013-07-02: Encryption Works: How to Protect Your Privacy in the Age of NSA Surveillance by Micah Lee on Freedom of the Press Foundation
  • 2013-05-21: Tails 0.18 can install packages on the fly on The H Open
  • 2013-01-31: Comment (ne pas) être (cyber)espionné ? by Jean-Marc Manach in "BUG BROTHER -- Qui surveillera les surveillants ?"
  • 2013-01-29: Tails is documented in Reporters Without Borders' Online Survival Kit
  • 2013-01-14: DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 490 announces Tails 0.16

2012

2011

Awards

  • 2014-03-11: Tails wins the 2014 Access Innovation Prize, for Endpoint Security. Access reports that "Tails embodies the successful collaboration of developers, trainers, security professionals towards tackling the spectrum of user needs -- from usability to security -- in high-risk environments".

Conferences

Video

Books