Not everyone needs to use the incredible powerful tools known as Tor and Tails. But everyone should understand what they are and what they can do.

Tor is a well established infrastructure that enables users to have more privacy when using the Internet. It is free and open source software combined with a well Designed architecture that encrypts traffic and routes it in a way that makes it hard to know who is visiting what website. This is very helpful in defending against corporate tracking and surveillance by hostile governments. It can also help reduce the ability of corporate media from knowing who you are when you visit their websites.

Tails is an operating system that runs on your computer. It is smartly designed to always start fresh so there are no stored cookies or memory of other settings like previous Internet connections or WiFi or passwords. And it is automatically set up to use Tor when communicating. It is also designed to prevent non approved applications from running. It boots from a flash drive each time you want to use it. Overall it is a much better engineered solution for protecting privacy and security.

There are negatives to using both Tor and Tails. Both introduce friction to your computer use. So before deciding to use them you should think through your threat model. Why do you want to use them? If you are a researching bad guys and are operating in a hostile country that is one use case for sure. Or are you are a target of hostile intelligence agencies? If you just want to operate a Pseudonymous Account for blogging and using twitter it might be overkill. On the other hand, since you will want to think long term and might be using your pseudonymous account for a lifetime, starting off with a good foundation of security may be the right approach.

At a minimum we encourage all who use the Internet to at least know about Tails and Tor. Read more at:

The Tor Project

The Tails Operating System

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