Converting dangerous documents to safe PDFs using Dangerzone

#TAILS

2024-08-06

Today, we added documentation on our website to install Dangerzone in Tails.

When you receive untrusted documents, for example, email attachments, Dangerzone allows you to convert them into safe PDFs before opening.

Dangerzone is particularly useful for journalists who might receive dangerous documents from anonymous sources or download them from the Internet.

Dangerzone is an essential tool and is built by great people. It was first written by Micah Lee to protect investigative journalists while working at The Intercept. Dangerzone is now maintained by Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit that protects public-interest journalism. Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras are on its Board of Directors.

It's totally the kind of software that aligns with our mission. The only reason why we are not including Dangerzone in Tails by default is because Dangerzone is too big and not available in Debian.

So, we collaborated with Alex Pyrgiotis from Freedom of the Press Foundation to make it as easy as possible to install Dangerzone in Tails as Additional Software. The setup requires using the command line, but, after that, Dangerzone will install automatically every time you start Tails.

Dangerzone will allow more investigative journalists to use the safe environment that Tails provides when manipulating sensitive documents.

It's also the first time that we recommend installing a 3rd party package that is not available in Debian. We know that a lot of software that would be useful for our users is not readily available in Debian. If this first experiment is successful, we might document more such packages.