Wait, TailsOS wasn’t created by the Tor project?
According to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_(operating_system)
Tails was first released on June 23, 2009. It is the next iteration of development on Incognito, a discontinued Gentoo-based Linux distribution.[9] The original project was called Amnesia. The operating system was born when Amnesia was merged with Incognito.[10] The Tor Project provided financial support for its development in the beginnings of the project.[8] Tails also received funding from the Open Technology Fund, Mozilla, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.[11]
Open Technology Fund
Which is funded by US Congress, and they also funded Signal.
For those do not wish to use privacy-related projects funded by a world government, what is a good (in your opinion) alternative? Both with and without Tor involvement (since US govt funded that too).
Yes I realize encryption, computers and the internet are all also govt-funded, but everyone is free to pick their battles.
Don’t entirely discount a project only because it is funded by the US government. Do take that as a big yellow flag, but not auto reject. Better to just asses the project for what it is with caution.
I find it much more likely that the US government has a huge interest in giving the public access to secure communication software that would be unbreakable by surveillance from a typical government. Why? Because those are the governments that are enemies of the US, and where the US is interested in regime change. And the existence of this software is much more influential towards regime change in those countries, rather than being threat to the US.
In fact, these softwares are barely a threat to the US. The US has no issue with them existing because they have such a powerful hold on their state.
I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.
A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:
Two flash drives
- One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
- One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.
Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.
