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TAILS is a highly-secure operating system (and a host of cool applications) designed to be booted off of a DVD or USB thumb drive. This not only makes TAILS easy to transport, but also ensures that TAILS can be booted and instantly useful from nearly any PC, Mac, or Chromebook. TAILS is built on Linux, a name you might recognize because it’s a popular, free, and open-source operating system that’s been available since 1991. TAILS, in particular, runs on a variant of Linux known as “Debian,” which became available in 1996. TAILS hit the big-time in 2013, when famed whistleblower and NSA contractor Edward Snowden used the software to contact reporter Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian newspaper in England and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden actually insisted that to communicate all three use TAILS along with all of its various built-in security and anonymity tools.