First, Harvard bomb kid was caught because of some decent sysadmins ran good network analysis and after receiving a bomb threat that was received from Tor saw that there was only a single student on the entire network that was running Tor.<p>ISP&#x27;s or network providers know if you&#x27;re running Tor, when you&#x27;re online and when you&#x27;re active (it has been used in criminal cases to link real people to online aliases)<p>Someone else in this thread pointed out that the download points for Tails are all HTTP - so you can&#x27;t find it and download it anonymously.<p>The way to do it would be to find an HTTPS mirror (avoiding search engines) or a public terminal.<p>IMO you shouldn&#x27;t use Tails as your personal machine. This isn&#x27;t a technical decision more a question of OPSEC policy. The key to anonymity is compartmentalization - the concept of creating, maintaining and then isolating your different identities.<p>Your real identity will continue to use your computer, your phone number, your internet connection, etc. It might tighten up some privacy leaks. Your anonymous identity (which may have a name) will use Tor in a virtual machine as a gateway and Linux in another virtual machine as a client, or it will boot into Tails. The anonymous identity using Tor has nothing in common with the real identity that can be linked together by a passive or active attacker.<p>For ex. your anon identity is doing anonymous stuff on anonymous online markets, but then you use the same Tails session to login to your personal Gmail. You&#x27;ve just been de-anonymized. Don&#x27;t share anything between the two identities (having the same interests, typing style, etc. to name a few) as that would tie an anonymous identity to a real one.<p>With this in mind, Tails is perfect for the use case of &#x27;I need to do some anonymous stuff with my anonymous identity and then get back&#x27; which is exactly how a lot of journalists, black hats, etc. use it. The more &#x27;comfortable&#x27; Tails is with features and programs the more likely you are to hang around and do something that will de-anonymize you :)