How Do I Tails?: A Beginner's Guide to Anonymous Computing

This talk serves as an introduction to The Amnesic Incognito Live System and anonymous computing. It covers why privacy is important, the various features of the operating system, and also touches on some basics of threat modeling and operational security. This talk was given at DEF CON 23 in the EFF's Crypto & Privacy Village. Due to limited village space, there were actually two presentations operating at the same time, hence the background noise. The microphone that I was using was pretty poor quality, and as such the audio isn't the best. I have taken the time to transcribe the audio to try and compensate for these problems, so try giving the captions a run. When the audio cuts out, it is due to someone speaking off screen and I removed the audio to protect their privacy. Since this presentation was given in August of 2015, there are portions that are now out of date or irrelevant. I will attempt to provide corrections and updates either in the description or annotations on the video itself. If you notice something that needs correction, send me a message and I'd be happy to tweak it. Big thanks to my buddy Kyle Hinckley, a.k.a. The Weirdist for his help in getting this project edited and rendered. He runs a channel showcasing strange builds in Bethesda games, so if that's your kind of thing check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/WeirdistBuilds Relevant links: Talk transcript: http://pastebin.com/4ZQXR7Vv Current Tails Installation Instructions: https://tails.boum.org/install/index.en.html Crypto Village site for handouts - https://cryptovillage.org/archives/dc23/ Tails - https://tails.boum.org/ Whonix - https://www.whonix.org/ Qubes OS - https://www.qubes-os.org/ Tor Project - https://www.torproject.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation - https://www.eff.org/ Freedom of the Press Foundation - https://freedom.press/ Errata: 2016/01/13 - I was mistaken about the method that Tails uses for time synchronization. See more information here: https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/Time_syncing/ 2016/01/15 - Added annotation for the Whonix page regarding Tor/VPN combinations: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Tunnels/Introduction 2016/07/07 - Since I've been getting a lot of spam comments on here about VPNs, here's a brief snippet about them from the Whonix Wiki: "Improper combination of Tor and another service may decrease your security and anonymity.... almost all users of Whonix, using Tor alone – without a VPN or proxy – is the right choice."