In 2021, the journalist Daniel Moßbrucker used Tails to investigate pedocriminal forums on the Darknet and took down 13.5 terabytes of photos and videos of child abuse.

Daniel and his team discovered that, despite the takedown of one of the biggest pedocriminal forum BoysTown by German authorities in April 2021, many of the content was still accessible online through regular file sharing websites on the clear web.

13.5 terabytes is like watching a video, in HD quality, for 365 days, every day, 24/7, of a child being abused. We, as journalists, collected and reported this amount of data in one day. Less than an hour later, the file sharing companies, who were stunned, deleted 28 000 links.

They then reached out to the German authorities asking them why they don't seem to be doing the easy work of actually removing the content from the Internet and limit themselves to prosecute the criminals.

Can you tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do?

I'm a freelance journalist in my thirties.

I wouldn't call myself a technology expert. I'm able to code a little bit, but for sophisticated projects like these, I still need someone with a real information security background to ask them how do certain things, which tools to use, and to check and improve my 30 lines of script.

I'm probably one of the few journalists in Germany that people think of when it comes to the so-called Darknet and Tor. As far as I know, I'm the only one doing trainings on Darknet research in Germany on a regular basis. If newsrooms have specific questions on the Darknet, I'm probably among the 2-3 people in Germany who are called because it's a quite specialized knowledge.

I also give trainings for journalists in digital security and consult some human-rights organizations on their IT infrastructure, together with a professional IT admin.

How did you get into mixing up journalism and technology so much?

When I learned about Snowden, it was something for me. I remember exactly where I was when I received the first push notification on my phone. I really thought, what the fuck is going on!

I felt the need to have a digital security training, but there was no such training in Germany. The Chaos Computer Club in Germany gave cryptoparties. They were nice and helpful, but I soon realized that they were organized by technologists missing the insights from working in a newsroom. People were discussing super secure things, but often these things aren't really going to work in practical journalism. So, I learned by myself, read a lot, started with PGP and all that stuff.

I started offering training to journalism associations and newsrooms. In 2016, I joined the Internet Freedom Desk at Reporters Without Borders Germany.

How do you use Tails in your work and why it is important?

I don't work with Tails everyday, but only sometimes. I always try to think in terms of threat models. Sometimes I don't consider the threat as so important that I have to make some compromise in my usability.

I use Tails whenever I have the impression that my online security is very important and I don't trust the Tor Browser on my regular computer anymore. It's the case for all my Darknet research. When I have to investigate something on the Darknet, I always use Tails, both for security and for practical reasons.

For example, we are convinced that journalists are allowed to investigate child abuse on the Darknet, but actually it's a gray zone. It's relatively clear that journalists are not allowed to do everything that the police does, and it's also relatively clear that journalists need to have the right to independently search for information, especially in such an important topic like the rights of children. However, nobody really knows what we are allowed to do exactly.

For 20 years, journalists in Germany didn't really care about their right on that topic. In the law, there's a paragraph saying that police is allowed to do research about child abuse online but journalists are not explicitly mentioned. Our legal department, however, found a way how we can investigate in these forums under certain circumstances. One of these circumstances is that our work serves only work purposes and it's an absolutely secure infrastructure we're working with, so that our data cannot fall into the wrong hands. Well, Tails is the way to go for this.

Apart from the research on child abuse, I also consult for newsrooms about cybercrime. For example, I was asked to investigate how a PayPal fraud was done in practice by a criminal group that was recently identified.

In such cases, I always use Tails because I only have to flash the USB stick and I already have everything I need: Tor Browser but also OnionShare, which is super important for my professional life. It's a bridge between me and the newsroom to transfer the results. It's always hard to get less technical people to use encryption tools, but it works to send them a link that they can open from Tor Browser.

For the research on child abuse, we used wget for most of our crawling and it's super useful to have it already installed.

I also use the office pack a lot, especially the Calculator. My IT colleagues always laugh because they can of course calculate everything about the raw data from the command line, but for me as a journalist, it's much easier and faster for me to do everything in the Calculator.

I really like this new tool to see how much CPU if used, the System Monitor. If I have a crawler or some script running on raw data, I can see how much CPU is being used and that's very helpful.

Do you have any interesting stories about the bright side of the Darknet?

In my journalistic work, when I report about the so-called darknet, I mostly focus on the bad side, the dark and criminal side. We see more of the criminal side because criminals would like to be seen, while the bright side is not that visible. The people who use it for their anonymity have no interested in telling the world about their super secret communication.

For stories about the bright side, I would differentiate between democratic countries in Western Europe and other non-democratic countries.

In Germany and other countries of "the West", my impression is that onion services are used only for anonymous dropboxes like SecureDrop. This is growing in Germany, especially because the Süddeutsche Zeitung is quite successful through Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, etc. These leaks motivate a lot of other media to do the same.

In non-democratic countries, I would say that OnionShare is useful for exile media, for example from Syria. People who are refugees in safe states like Germany can get support from organizations like Reporters Without Borders to set up their infrastructure and their website. But they still have correspondents and reporters in the country. OnionShare was great for them, especially in war times.

I also know activists travelling to conflict zones, who know that they will be checked at the border control. They cross the border only with their business smartphone and are trained by us on doing their work from Tails.

2 years ago, I realized that this usage of OnionShare is now decreasing because of the desktop client of Signal. It basically fulfils all their needs and also work on mobile. For correspondents in the field, it's just one work step less to do. It's still secure because it's end-to-end encrypted and they are using Signal and a VPN anyway. It's also easier, which means lowering the risk of doing mistakes.

OnionShare might be extra secure and anonymous but I have to share the link with my communication partner anyway, preferably on an end-to-end encrypted channel and so do it on Signal already.

What are the things that you don't like or miss in Tails and we should improve?

Kazaam

What I always have to install is Kazaam, a tool to record my screen, because we're doing TV and pictures are more attractive if they move. I install it from the Additional Software packages. It always takes time, but it's not a big deal.

PGP

I have to send certain things back to the newsrooms encrypted with PGP. It's easy for me to download PGP keys from public key servers, but I wouldn't import my private PGP key into Tails. I make another temporary PGP key pair, share the public key with my colleagues, and use it for that.

I always install Kleopatra from the Additional Software Packages because I think that there's no other way of generating a PGP key and using it in a graphic interface to encrypt and decrypt text and files. I always integrate my keys produced elsewhere but I haven't been able to generate and use them there. Probably, it's a fault on my side. But honestly speaking, I found my workaround with Kleopatra and never again searched for another solution.

(I tell him that it's already possible to generate keys using the Password & Keys utility, encrypt text using the OpenPGP Applet, and encrypt files using the Files utility.)

I know that it's possible to use PGP in Thunderbird, but as far as I remember, I would have to set up an email and it's usually too much. I use PGP to encrypt files, not necessarily emails. It's super easy with Kleopatra, as we know the program already from outside Tails.

To share files, the newsrooms usually give us a link to their Nextcloud or similar where we can upload files and we don't want to upload them in plaintext. So we use PGP. It's very practical because I can just upload them from the browser and encrypt the content with the public keys of the colleagues.

I know that the main feature of Tails is that it gives me this security island, that I have strong borders and strong walls and that this protects me in a way. But then, we always need this little window to communicate with our colleagues in the newsroom.

For me, once I did my research and I have my results and have to send it to the newsroom, I don't want to use a USB stick that I used for my research on my regular computer. If I spend 3 days researching child abuse in forums, I don't want a single second of this material on my computer. This "gate to exchange" with the newsroom is always a challenge.

VeraCrypt

What is absolutely missing is that I can't create a VeraCrypt volume from Tails. I can open an existing one, but I have to create it somewhere else.

My workflow at the moment is to set up an empty VeraCrypt volume on a non-Tails computer. Then I send this empty VeraCrypt volume to my Tails. Put the data in Tails. Lock it.

We use VeraCrypt especially for the backup of our data. So while PGP is for the exchange of smaller files with others, VeraCrypt is useful to back up data.

Jitsi

Jitsi or some kind of live communications tool would be great, not only because of usability, but also for journalistic work.

It's a trend in documentaries to take our audience on a journey, be with us in our meetings and how we do our work. It would be much more interactive and open us some really important stylistic features, if I would have an option to make the meeting with my newsroom with my Tails computer and share my screen.

(I tell him that Tor is working on this.)

Signal

I was wondering whether it's possible to start the Signal desktop client on Tails. I could share data, I could have a video call or an audio call. Somebody asked about this on Reddit and he was insulted by people saying "how stupid are you, people on Tails are doing everything to not connect any data with your identity". It sounded reasonable, so I never followed this path again. However, I assume that an integration of Signal would be a game-changer for Tails, and journalists would accept it much more.

What is the biggest hurdle to Tails being adopted more by journalists?

I think that you are already on the right path by making the setup easier and easier.

I remember a training about 2 years ago, where there was one of the best known journalists in Germany, covering surveillance issues like the NSA scandal. I asked him what he was doing here and that he could have run the training himself. He answered that he had never been able to boot Tails.

If people were very interested in using Tails and took the time to read your steps on the website, people would be able to flash the USB stick with Etcher, and boot it. This onboarding takes most of the time.

The second thing, is that I always explain them that all the compromises that they have to make are not a bug but a feature. That they get something out of it. It's more complicated than Windows, but you now have one of the most secure operating systems. My experience is that people accept some burdens once they understand that it's for a good reason.

Moreover, we need people to do more sessions in journalistic conferences: "Your start with Tails in 90 minutes". Maybe they won't need it every day, but at least they did it once and saw that it's easy.

You need to really bring it to people and get in touch with them. Unfortunately, I don't think that a lot of people will do it when it's just there available on the Internet.