Tails is an amnesic incognito live operating system, that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, by forgetting everything that you have done once turned off, and by routing everything through Tor.
For seven years, Tails has been used and advocated by a wide range of people, including Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras. Called by the NSA a "major threat", with more than half a million boots per month, outliving other privacy-oriented distributions, Tails is a big player in the security for the masses game since a long time, and is here to stay! But how does this project make itself accessible, usable and appealing to non-technophile users, while maintaining a good level of security and privacy?
While it's quite easy to make a secure pet-project for a small group of technical friends, it is completely different when it comes to make it usable for a really big set of different people, and to keep it running for years.
This is what we'd like to talk about, how the Tails team manages to combine security for its users, usability, and keeping the boat afloat. And also a few cool tricks about Tails and opsec;)
We'll talk about doing unit-testing a whole livecd, getting everything translated, nation-state adversaries, handling support on a 24/7 schedule, making contributors build a complete distribution, and keeping up with emergency security updates while assuring a complete transparency about everything.