Hi,
I had some discussions with some of the people supporting the
journalists working on the Snowden archives and journalists using tools.
Some of them are custom written and only do one job, take out all the
"speaker notes" for example in powerpoint presentations (don't ask).
Most of that stuff isn't packaged in Debian and they have to install it
themselves.
The discussion we had maybe in the open or maybe in the backchannels
was, could we maintain some kind of "journalist pack" for persistence
where we package these tools somewhat and these things install when you
setup your persistence.
We would also maintain some sort of deb repo for this. Maybe this could
even be a way to get some funding in from bigger organisations and a way
to support them in software! (crazy thought)
I don't think we reached any conclusion or actionable points so thanks
for starting this discussion again and I hope my blurp is good for
something.
Best,
Jurre
Loic Dachary:
> 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
>
