[Tails-dev] Searching documents in an airgap Tails

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Author: Loic Dachary
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: [Tails-dev] Searching documents in an airgap Tails
Hi,

Journalist using SecureDrop decrypt and read documents in an airgap Tails. I wonder which tools are available to search the documents stored in their persistence. Maybe this topic was discussed somewhere already ? Looking for "search engine" and other similar words in readmine[1] points to numerous entries related to web search engines, reason why I may have missed something focused specifically on this problem.

Ideally Tails would come with the best search tools there is for Debian GNU/Linux. But ... the footprint of these tools may be too much to impose on all Tails users since journalists are a minority. Even if we care very much about investigative journalists working on airgap machines, adding hundreds of mega bytes to the Tails ISO could have a negative impact for the majority of use cases.

An alternative would be to add those tools in the persistence so they are installed on every reboot[2]. While this is a fine temporary solution or when the the packages are small, it significantly increases the boot time (because packages are re-installed on boot). And there is no documented upgrade path for these packages. It may be the case that this eventually improves as part of rethinking the installation and upgrade process[3] though.

Any advice you may have, things I could do to move forward, would be most welcome :-)

Cheers

[1] https://labs.riseup.net/code/projects/tails/issues
[2] https://tails.boum.org/doc/advanced_topics/additional_software/index.en.html
[3] Rethink the installation process and upgrade process https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/11679
--
Loïc Dachary, Artisan Logiciel Libre