Tales from Tails development

Abstract

Tails is an operating system installed on a USB stick which protects against surveillance and censorship. To minimize traces, it is “amnesic” – except for what is explicitly saved – and routes all connections through the Tor network. Tails has been in development since 2009. While many other live systems with similar goals existed around that time, Tails is the one which survived the amount of work and dedication required to maintain such a project. Several design and organisational choices made possible for Tails to survive with very limited resources. intrigeri has been active in Tails since the early days and will happily answer almost all our questions on how a full operating system gets engineering from various free software components, and the many challenges that it creates.