team

About us

Mission

Our mission is to empower people worldwide by giving out an operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship.

If you want to help, see https://tails.net/contribute/ :)

Team members

name role email Matrix/IRC
intrigeri Tails Team Lead intrigeri at torproject dot org intrigeri
anonym Tails Developer anonym at torproject dot org anonym
boyska Tails Developer boyska at torproject dot org boyska

Contact

If you already know which individual team member is the best placed to have the conversation you need, contact them directly. In doubt, contact the Team Lead.

Email

If you need to get in touch with the entire Tails Team at once, you can:

  • write to the foundations@tails.net Schleuder mailing list
  • mention @tails-team on GitLab: GitLab will send an email notification about it to every member of the Tails Team, and add it to their To-Do list.

Text-based chat

See https://tails.net/contribute/chat/.

How our team & work connect to the rest of Tor

The Tails product is built on top of other Tor products (among other things), so we collaborate regularly with the teams that build these products:

We constantly work with the UX Team, that helps us understand the needs of our users and make the Tails user experience a better fit for their needs.

Like all other teams at Tor, we also interface with internal structures and support teams, in particular TPA given our strong dependency on systems infrastructure.

We interact less frequently with other teams but we do appreciate their work!

Process

Other resources

Priorities

Priorities for 2026

MUST

Sustainability Adoption Quality & Retention Long-term strategy Safety
Upgrade to Tor Browser 16.0 (tails#21318) Signal (tails#14567) or VPN Browser (tails#19465) Signal (tails#14567) or VPN Browser (tails#19465) Have a conversation about privacy-preserving metrics (tails#19476) Protect users against compromised infrastructure (tails#21077)
Upgrade to Thunderbird 153 (tails#21319) Improve onboarding of Windows 11 users (tails#21132 (closed), tails#21133 (closed)) Polish the product's UX
Finish upgrades to Trixie (tails#20581 (closed), tails#20249 (closed))
Ensure long-term sustainability of our CI setup (tails#21320)
Be a good downstream for the NT wrt. Arti development
Try cheap upstreaming of about:tor customization (tails#21251)
Identify & fix most user-impacting uses of boum.org (tails#21322)
Ensure test suite does not get more fragile

SHOULD

Sustainability Adoption Quality & Retention Long-term strategy Safety
Prepare the migration to Tor's GitLab (tails#21324) Improve website for new users (tails#21325) Define N-years strategy for Tails in TPI (tails#21326)
Unwrap the Tor Browser (tails#21185) Snowflake (tails#5494)
Determine what it would take for viable Apple silicon support (tails#21321)
Circumvention Settings API (tails#15331 (closed))

MAY

Sustainability Adoption Quality & Retention Long-term strategy Safety
Release process: drop the "Build the almost-final images" step (tails#19015) Simplify tpsd to make it more robust (tails#21328) More apps can be installed via Flatpak Measure percentage of users who verify image download (tails#20546)
Reduce dependency on boum.org (tails#21323) Improve error messages to support users whose USB stick is defective (tails#21329) Improve UX of upgrades and minimize technical debt (tails#21187)
Converge workflows and tooling to TPI's (tails#21327)
Make Tails Cloner not a blocker (tails#19666)
Upstream about:tor customization (tails#21251)

Priorities for 2027

These are candidates that emerged while doing tails/tails#20795+:

MUST

  • Migrate to gitlab.torproject.org
  • Port to Debian 14 (Forky)
  • 1 big feature among:
    • Apple silicon / ARM64
    • Improve UX of upgrades (e.g. big IUKs)
    • Persistent Storage backups — might require rewriting Tails Cloner
    • the one we did not implement in 2026, among Signal & VPN Browser

Misc

  • Make plans for the merge of the Weblate infrastructure
  • Bigger work on hiding / censorship / Tor Connection
  • More Pluggable Transports
  • Persistent Storage features
  • Additional Flatpak apps
  • VPN for Signal (video calls)
  • FAT partition with help
  • metrics that users trust
  • remove dependency on boum.org (tails#21323)

Past priorities

Roadmap

This is the big picture. For details about what's happening on the short term, see the board and filter with the current milestone.

Projects

None at the moment.

2026 Q2

Capacity

April

  • KTLO & Sustainability

  • Safety

    • tails#21481+ — MUST
      • Ask TPA to implement cheap mitigation
      • Start discussion with TPA about trusted mirror pool (tails#21490)

  • Quality & Retention

    • Get ready for upcoming UEFI CA expiration & transition (tails#21079 (closed)) — MUST
    • Polish the product's UX

  • Adoption

    • tails#21493+

  • Stretch goals

    • Snowflake (tails#5494) (@boyska) — SHOULD
    • Support automatic bridge retrieval, iteration 2 (tails#21472) — SHOULD
      • The scope is exactly what's written on the issue currently, i.e. our original iteration 2, and includes none of the other issues identified while developing iteration 1.

May-June?

We'll reconsider these plans late April or early May, depending on other priorities that may pop up until then.

Boards

2026 Q3

Boards:

2026 Q4

  • KTLO & Sustainability
    • Frontdesk
    • Test suite health monitor (@anonym)
    • Ensure test suite does not get more fragile (@anonym) — MUST
    • Define Tails Team priorities & roadmap for 2027 (@tails-team, @sajolida, potentially PM or Product Managers) — MUST
    • Be a good downstream for the NT wrt. Arti development (@boyska) — MUST
    • Prepare the migration to Tor's GitLab (tails#21324) (@intrigeri) — SHOULD
  • Adoption
  • Quality & Retention
  • Long-term strategy
  • Safety

Boards: