[liberationtech] Linux distribution on encrypted USB?

[Moon Jones]

On 12.09.2013 18:12, The Doctor wrote:
> For folks that have not yet gone poking around inside a copy of TAILS
> installed on a USB key, Moon refers to the contents of the file
> filesystem.squashfs

Thank for for the detalied description. Very useful. Myself I did not 
know all that you have written.

>> like tripwire data, or at least some fingerprints and a file list
>> to confirm the libs haven't turn against you overnight.
>
> AIDE would be ideal for this, one would think.  It is much more
> lightweight than Tripwire, and could be set to run at boot or login time.

I have chosen tripwire because of its «quite obvious» name. But AIDE 
looks like a better solution.

> TAILS does seem to be somewhat problematic in this respect.  For
> example, I tried to install a couple of Firefox plugins that I find
> very useful (Scrapbook and Calomel-SSL, if anyone is interested) and
> they didn't persist across reboots.  A little irritating, but perhaps
> it's for the best.

That's pretty much the answer Tails should not be used as a regular 
distro. That and Intrigieri's point: before modifying Tails one should 
know more both about Tails and Debian.

>> I was thinking for my everyday system portable from one computer
>> to another without touching the installed hard drive. The config
>> is different. And I'm afraid to break stuff.
>
> This makes me wonder just how much abuse TAILS can really take before
> it breaks down...

Tails is good at what it does. But it's not an universal solution. 
Poking around distrowatch again I find it discouraging how much junk 
there is. Maybe hundreds of repacks of nvidia and ati/amd proprietary 
drivers labeled as «ease of use» and almost nothing on privacy. Than, if 
people would be interested in privacy there won't be a Snowden talk.