This is a REALLY, REALLY good reason why "activists" of any variety should be trained in how to acquire an old Thinkpad and install Debian on it (plus a reasonably xorg/XFCE4 desktop environment). If you're dealing with authoritarian regimes you can do a lot to reduce your attack surface. However at the end it all comes down to rubber hose cryptography. If your government, for example Bahrain decides to detain and torture you, you're pretty much fucked.
you realize TAILS is just debian with TOR, and non persistent storage?
I'm sure you can find a way to spear phish somebody and send them a Linux ELF binary that they will then execute, but accomplishing that is considerably harder than on Windows/OSX/Android/iOS.
> I'm sure you can find a way to spear phish somebody and send them a Linux ELF binary that they will then execute, but accomplishing that is considerably harder than on Windows/OSX/Android/iOS.
I'm afraid people are just as foolable and code just as executable on Debian as on any other platform. Additionally, vulnerabilities on Android are likely exploitable on Debian.
You will not survive an attack from a state adversary because you used Qubes, or OpenBSD, and certainly not TAILS (which is not particularly secure, just well integrated with Tor). You will survive because you are familiar with your tools of choice and you know how to secure them.
As a final note, if you're being targeted by a nation state, getting an pre-owned ThinkPad will probably result in getting a pre-0wn3d ThinkPad.
If you're being targeted by a nation state you will face all sorts of things to deal with that can't be handled by buying a Thinkpad with cash from a randomly chosen used computer store. Like bugging your residence and office, bugging your car, putting advanced GPS tracking devices on your car, rubber hose cryptography, hardware keystroke loggers inserted in your equipment while you're known to be away from your home or office, full disk copies of your laptop/desktop being taken (clonezille-type) by breaking into your office while you're away, all sorts of shit.
If you don't keep your airgapped laptop on your person or in a tamper evident container at all times, it isn't an airgapped laptop. And if it isn't an airgapped laptop, it shouldn't know any secrets.
At which point if you're a UAE dissident and trying to deal with all this while living in the territory of the UAE, you might say "fuck it" and find a way to move to Toronto.
replace "UAE" with "Ethiopia" or any other authoritarian regime.
Could somebody or a group who needed privacy implement a ground floor system like Menuet OS [1] or KolibriOS [2] running some sort of EC cryptography, and custom communication protocols off of a live CD or USB stick.
Would this even be practical? I realize TAILS is an attempt at bringing these tools to as many people who may not be technical, but for a smaller, more tech-saavy group, would this work?
