Tails Linux USB with Persistence (Be invisible online in 7 minutes)

In this video I'm going to show you how to install  Tails on a USB flash drive it's actually a very   simple installation and the documentation on  the Tails website is very good but the big   question is why would you want to do this? [Music]  Tails is recommended by the author of this book   extreme privacy what it takes to disappear it's  recommended by others including Edward Snowden   the co-founder of the Tor project as well as  the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now if you   already know what Tails is and all you're  interested in seeing is the installation   process then jump to this timestamp but what  is Tails? It's essentially a portable Operating   System that runs off a USB flash drive when your  computer is shut down everything is lost it's   an ephemeral Operating System in other words  all the information is loaded into memory or   RAM when power is lost or the computer is shut  down everything is lost now you can create some   persistency on the flash drive if you want to.  So on the Tails website I actually explain this   really nicely they tell you that this leaves  no trace on your computer it allows you as an   example to use someone else's computer so this is  a Windows laptop but I perhaps don't trust Windows   Windows could have viruses on it it could have  a key log it could have some other kind of   software running on it so I boot into Tails runs  in RAM when the computers shut down everything is   lost. So as they show you on the website it has  Amnesia everything you do disappears once you   shut the computer down but you can have persistent  storage so as an example why would you want to do   that because you want to keep persistency of your  documents as an example or your Wi-Fi passwords   or your browser bookmarks it's not required that  you do that but the thing about the persistent   storage is it's encrypted only someone who knows  the password of that encrypted storage can access   those persistent documents and you don't have to  use them if you don't want to the browser shown   here is Tor all your traffic is pushed through Tor  passing through three relays the whole idea here   is to make your traffic anonymous so that people  can't see what you're doing. Tails allows you to   avoid online surveillance and censorship who would  be interested in using this well anyone perhaps   who's interested in extra privacy in the world  today where we attract so much other examples   would be activists journalists and their sources  domestic violence survivors basically Tails is   fantastic if you want a secure Operating System  that's ephemeral where everything is lost once   you reboot your computer as an example I'll  power off this computer everything is gone   I can take this out and then if I turn my computer  on again so once this reboots it will boot into   Windows as you can see there it's starting up  and we've booted into Windows so Tails is running   entirely off this USB flash drive it's ephemeral  everything is lost when you reboot okay but that's   enough talking let me show you how to get Tails  installed. Okay so I've booted into Windows I've   gone to the Tails website what I need is a USB  flash drive which I've got here I'll use the same   one that I actually installed Tails on we'll just  overwrite the information on the flash drive click   on the installed Tails menu option in my example  I'm using Windows to do the installation you could   do the installation using Mac OS or Linux as an  example or the Terminal but I'm just going to use   Windows for this example because most people  that watch my videos use Windows I personally   use Windows, Mac, Linux different operating systems  because they all have advantages and disadvantages   so we're told you that you need a USB stick you need  Windows 7 or later you need at least two gig of   RAM and they say you need a smartphone but you  don't actually need that for the installation and   then what we're going to do firstly is download  Tails so we're going to download the image it's   about 1.3 gig in size so I'll download that  I've actually previously downloaded it just   in preparation for this video and I was running  it on this USB flash drive before so let's see   how long that takes to download now we are warned  that Tails is safe but it's not magic you've got   to realize that there are limitations of the tour  Network there's certain things that you shouldn't   do so have a look at their warnings don't do dumb  things don't make these beginner mistakes and lose   the whole power of Tails so you can read that  in your own time the next thing we need to do   is verify the download. So once you've downloaded  Tails they want you to verify that it's actually a   good installation so I'll do that using the file  that I previously downloaded so click open and   that will basically verify your download to make  sure that it hasn't been corrupted okay so we told   there that there's a problem with the download  and that's because it's an old download notice   here the verification also fails if you try to  verify different download than the latest version   of Tails so that version I actually downloaded  yesterday and it failed the verification process   so what I'll do now is select my new version  so it's actually this version 516 and click   open [Music] and there you go the verification  was successful so we were able to prove that   we actually downloaded the right version of  Tails now what we're going to do is download   Etcher so that we can write the image to our  flash drive and then we told basically to open   up Etcher to do the installation. Okay so there  you go etcher portable has been downloaded so   I'll open up the application it's picked up  the USB SanDisk Flash drive so that's the   device I'm going to write to I'm going to flash  this new version of Tails so 516 at the time   of this recording click open and click Flash and  that'll basically flash it to the USB flash drive   you can see it's about 17% at the moment [Music]  okay it's been written and now it's validating. you get the idea Okay there you go flash completed  we're told so we're done now on the Tails website   we're told that we're all done but something I  didn't mention is your flash drive is going to   be overwritten so just be aware that if you've  got anything important on that flash drive you   should back it up because it's going to be wipe  and then overwritten okay so we're done now they   tell us that we can do other things but we don't  really need to do this we can click on start and   use shift at the same time when restarting the  machine to allow us to select that it boots from   the USB flash drive I'm not going to do that for  this example I'm simply going to click restart   and then what I'll do is I'll press F2 which is  the keystroke for this laptop to get it to boot   into BIOS this really depends on the laptop we  have created some documentation the PDF which   you can download that helps you perhaps set up  this installation but it's actually a very simple   installation and the Tails website is very good so  I pressed F2 and now I should be able to boot off   the USB flash drive notice what happens it doesn't  show the USB flash drive and that's because it's   recommended that you don't insert the USB flash  drive when Windows is powered on and it actually   ejected if you like of the USB flash drive so what  I need to do is I need to redo this so I'm going   to save and exit and then I'm going to press F2  again after inserting the USB flash drive again   to make sure that it boots from that USB flash  drive and notice now it's picked it up so I'm   going to move the flash drive to position one your  BIOS will obviously vary so you need to check the   settings of your laptop and the BIOS settings  something else to be aware of under advanced   mode you may need to go to security and disable  secure boot so that's already disabled on my   laptop because I've already done this previously  but you may have to disable secure Boot and what   I'm going to do is save my changes click OK  and hopefully that should now boot into Tails   and there you go we can boot directly into  Tails or use other options I'll just let   it go to the default okay so when it boots up  you have various options you can specify your   language your keyboard layout etc and one of  the options is to create persistent storage   so if you want persistent storage you can  specify that here and then click Start Tails and then you need to specify a password for  your persistent storage I'll use a very bad   password of password obviously you're going to  want to use something much better than that but   the idea is that you use a password to encrypt  your persistent storage you don't have to create   that but that does allow you for instance to  keep your Wi-Fi passwords and your documents   and so forth as mentioned when Tails boots up  it also asks you about your Tor connection do   you want to connect to Tor automatically and in my  case I do you can also get it to use a Tor bridge   and if you're not sure what these options are it  tells you what they are here so Tor bridges are   secret Tor relays so use this as your first  Tor relay if connections to Tor are being   blocked so for example in some countries by some  public networks or by some parental controls I   don't have a problem here because this is my own  network I've actually not connected to the Wi-Fi   I'm connecting to a physical Ethernet cable so I'm  actually connected by this USB Ethernet connection   you've got to decide for yourself whether you  want to use Wi-Fi obviously in some places you   need to do that and you may want to have extra  privacy and security so you check that option   and you can also hide to your local network that  you're using Tor so if you think that someone is   monitoring the local network for Tor connections  you can use that that's not really relevant for   my example so I'll just connect to Tor and going  back to persistent storage notice you can specify   various options in your persistent storage I'm  happy with the defaults and as you can see here   we've now connected successfully to Tor so we can  start the Tor browser you want to wait for that   connection to succeed before you actually start  Tor but there you go we've got Tails installed   on this USB flash drive on this Windows laptop  I've booted into Tails that gives me a secure   operating system so if I'm worried about viruses  or key loggers or other malicious software on   this laptop I can boot into Tails and not have to  worry about that my connections are secure in Tails   because I'm pushing everything through Tor it's  obviously going to be a lot slower and you may   have problems connecting to certain websites  so as an example if I search for social blade   and just note it's using DuckDuckGo instead of  Google for this so much more privacy orientated   search engine but I'm now going to social blade  and I have had problems actually on social blade   in the past it's not giving me problem share  which is great to see but some websites may block   Tor but as an example I can search for myself  and look at the analytics of for instance my   YouTube channel on social blade and there you go  you can see number of views in the last 28 days   of information relating to my YouTube channel  but the point is is that I'm using Tor on a   secure Operating System if I'm worried about  something so I need to shut my computer down   I can simply shut it down and everything is lost  except for that persistent storage because Tails   is running in memory so everything is gone now  and if I pull that out and start up the computer   it'll boot back into Windows and there you go  I'm back into Windows now because I've pulled   out the USB flash drive. Hopefully you enjoyed this  video if you did please like it please consider   subscribing to my YouTube channel and clicking  on the bell to get notifications I'm David Bombal   and I want to wish you all the very best go  out there stay safe and stay private thanks

Channel: David Bombal

Views: 760,755

Keywords: tails, tails os, wifi, tails linux, linux, tor, tor privacy, linux os, os, privacy, online privacy, anonymous, incognito, nsa, proxy chains, proxy chain, anonoyous, vpn, cubes, hack, how to browse the internet anonymously, how to be anonymous on the internet, invisible online, kali linux, how to be anonymous, browse the internet anonymously, hide online, hidden identity, best private linux distro, most anonymous linux distro, linux privacy, tails privacy, tails persistency, gnome

Id: gO9fTnMxwYw

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023