Distros

Here in the UK, we have yet another piece of surveillance legislation going through Parliament, the Investigatory Powers Bill. This will make mass surveillance legal and even require ISPs to keep records of their customers’ online activities for the past year. The only good thing about this is that at least it’s now out in the open, after the revelations of recent years regarding government mass surveillance, and is being discussed in an open forum. Not everyone lives in a society where basic liberties are acknowledged or even discussed, so we should take care to preserve those rights.

It is quite timely that we have the latest release of Tails on this month’s DVD. This uses open source’s ability to take pieces from various projects and combine them in a different way to achieve a specific goal. Tails is a Debian system at its heart, but the core technology used is Tor, which was originally developed by the US Navy but then open sourced, so now anyone can have secure and anonymous communications.

Of course, anonymity can be used to hide illicit activities, but it can also be used to preserve basic rights to privacy.