GoodCrypto provides the tools GPG and Tor that Ed Snowden used. Why not Tails?

We use Tails almost daily. For many months it was the base Linux distro for GoodCrypto.

Snowden relied on Tails. Even though he used plain email with PGP for much of his communications, adding Tails makes you safer.

But for a server, Tails has flaws. It includes a GUI stack and many end user apps. That means it has a large attack surface. This is an unnecessary risk for a server. We removed the extra apps. But Tails is dependent on the GUI even during boot.

In our limited user testing with technical people, they found Tails very hard to use. We reported our results to the Tails team. They were already working on it. But they are a small underfunded team like us, and their resources are limited.

We finally moved to a much smaller custom distro. It was, and is, a difficult call.