In this newsletter, we share inspiring stories of Tails users around the world, privacy tips, and the latest from our team with our supporters.
Help us shape the future of Tails!
In 2021–2023, we focused on improving the usability of some core features of Tails. We redesigned the Tor Connection to make it easier to circumvent censorship and the Persistent Storage to make it easier to store encrypted data in Tails.
What shall we work on next?
We have identified the need for better communication tools as a priority for our users. We are considering 2 main options:
- Make it possible to use a VPN instead of Tor in some cases
- Add support for better messaging applications
In the coming months, we will do some research to understand the needs of our users and decide which of these features to work on first.
As a start, we wanted your opinion as supporters of Tails. Help us decide by answering this 5-minute survey.
Encryption under attack worldwide
French law enforcement is now allowed to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone, and GPS of their electronic devices. It’s not clear how they plan to execute this, but malware like Pegasus could do the trick.
The Justice Minister has been adamant that “we're far away from the totalitarianism of 1984” George Orwell's novel about a society under total surveillance. And of course, the lawmakers were quick to exempt themselves from the invasive law.
The French authorities aren't alone in wanting backdoors in encrypted communications. On the other side of the English Channel, lawmakers with the United Kingdom are about to mandate backdoors in all end-to-end encrypted messaging systems and erode encryption worldwide in the Online Safety Bill. This perpetual wiretap will, allegedly, make the United Kingdom “the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression”.
In a document from the European Council leaked to WIRED, a majority of EU countries are in favor of some form of scanning of encrypted messages. Spain has the most extreme position and proposes to “legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption”.
In the USA, the return of the EARN IT Act also threatens the possibility for companies to provide end-to-end encryption.
Amidst repression in France, using Tails is not a crime
Tails, together with another 130 people and organizations, signed a call to defend our right to encryption, written by La Quadrature du Net.
Digital surveillance of dissenting socio-political movements has been intensifying in France for years. Environmental activists are being surveilled with military-grade equipment and Emmanuel Macron blames social media for the uprising that followed the racist killing of a 17-year-old by the police.
As if that wasn’t enough, the mere use of privacy-preserving tools like Tor and Tails is being treated as evidence of criminal behavior to muzzle dissenting political groups. In the French senate, the Minister of Interior begged for the power to hack into the phones of demonstrators who use Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram. In this “8 December” case, the suspects’ use of Tails, and apparent distrust of GAFAM were used to support an already nebulous case.
In 2009, in a similar wave of repression, we created Tails precisely to avoid activists getting in trouble merely because of how they used computers.
In 2023, not much has changed. It’s saddening and enraging that digital privacy and safety are rapidly getting out of reach. Tails’s mission as important now, if not more, as it was 15 years ago.
On that note, we’d like to thank our sponsors: Nym, ThinkPenguin, Look to the Right, Exam Success, and freiheitsfoo. They have all supported our work over the last year, and have renewed their support. If you too would like to sponsor Tails, get in touch with us at tails-fundraising@boum.org.
Welcome to tails.net
Tails has a cool, new domain: tails.net.
After 14 years of using a subdomain of boum.org , we finally found a new home
that will be easier for everybody to remember and type. Tails
will become easier to find by the people who need it the most.
The tails.boum.org domain will continue working for some time.
Thank you to
boum.org, for supporting us all these years!
What we’re reading
In India, the state of Manipur has spiraled into intense communal and ethnic conflict. A 3-month internet shutdown led to the silencing of the minority Kuki community. Internet access was permitted for people with broadband connections who undertook to only use static IP and not use any VPNs. Mobile internet remains inaccessible and is the dominant way to access the internet for the Kuki community. The dystopian undertaking makes for a
funchilling read.In Surveillance: You can know too much, Cory Doctorow decries the intrusive data collection tendencies of law enforcement around the world. A seasoned advocate of individuals’ privacy rights and critic of surveillance capitalism, he argues that law enforcement doesn't know what to do with the data it already has. As countries around the world lust after collecting more and more data, this article is both prescient and timeless.
The IETF, the international organization responsible for all the standards that make the Internet work, has recently published a new standard for the end-to-end encryption of messages for 2 people or more. MSL (Messaging Layer Security) will make it easier and safer to add end-to-end encryption to more Internet applications.
The Tor project is calling for more obfs4 bridges to help people in Turkmenistan circumvent censorship. If you have access to an IP address that hasn't run a Tor bridge yet, you can help thousands of people in Turkmenistan connect to the Internet.
