Tails is a live media Linux distro designed to boot into a highly secure desktop environment. Tor is a browser that prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Learn why anonymity matters and how you can protect yourself by reading the following archived Linux Journal articles:

Tails above the Rest: the Installation by Kyle Rankin: how to get and validate the Tails distribution and install it. I will follow up with what Tails can and can't do to protect your privacy, and how to use Tails in a way that minimizes your risk. Then I will finish with some more advanced features of Tails, including the use of a persistent volume (with this feature, depending on your needs, you could conceivably use Tails as your main Linux distribution).

Tails above the Rest, Part II by Kyle Rankin: now that you have Tails installed, let's start using it. Read on to find out how to get started.

Tails above the Rest, Part III by Kyle Rankin: in the first two parts on this series, I gave an overview of Tails, including how to get the distribution securely, and once you have it, how to use some of the basic tools. Here, I cover some of the more advanced features of Tails, such as some of its log-in options, its suite of encryption tools and the persistent disk.

Tor Security for Android and Desktop Linux by Charles Fischer: the Tor Project presents an effective countermeasure against hostile and disingenuous carriers and ISPs that, on a properly rooted and capable Android device or Linux system, can force all network traffic through Tor encrypted entry points (guard nodes) with custom rules for iptables. This action renders all device network activity opaque to the upstream carrier—barring exceptional intervention, all efforts to track a user are afterwards futile.

A Bundle of Tor by Kyle Rankin: the best way to set up Tor on your personal machine.

Dolphins in the NSA Dragnet by Kyle Rankin: as I mentioned in "NSA: Linux Journal is an ‘extremist forum’ and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance”, the NSA has been flagging certain Internet traffic as extremist based on specific patterns. Alongside patterns that match anyone who was searching for information about the Tor and Tails projects was the following pattern:

linuxjournal.com/content/linux*