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Set Up the Transfer Device

Journalists copy submissions from their Journalist Workstation to the Secure Viewing Station using the Transfer Device which can be a DVD or a USB drive.

Select DVDs or USBs

Using DVDs as the Transfer Device provides some protection against certain kinds of esoteric USB-based attacks on the Secure Viewing Station, but requires that you have blank DVDs, a dedicated DVD drive for the Secure Viewing Station, DVD drives for use with Journalist Workstations, and a shredder capable of destroying DVDs. Unless you are certain that you need to use DVDs as the Transfer Device, you should use USB drives instead. If you have chosen to use DVDs instead, there is nothing to set up now — just make sure that you have all the hardware on hand.

USB Transfer Device Configuration

The easiest and recommended option for a Transfer Device is a USB drive. If you have a large team of journalists you may want to create several <onboarding> of these. Here we'll just walk through making one Transfer Device1.

Create a USB Transfer Device

Note

This process will destroy all data currently on the drive.

First, label your USB drive “SecureDrop Transfer Device”.

On the Secure Viewing Station, open the Applications menu in the top left corner and select Utilities then Disk Utility icon Disks:

screenshot of the Applications menu in Tails, highlighting Disk Utility

Connect your Transfer Device then pick your device in the menu on the left. Since we're going to destroy all the data on this drive, it's important that you pick the right drive. It should be named something that sounds similar to the manufacturer's label on the outside of the drive, and it will only appear after you plug it in. Double check that you have clicked on the correct drive:

screenshot of Disk Utility application

Once you're sure you have the right drive, click the interlocking gears, then Format Partition....

Note

If there are multiple existing partitions on the drive, you should first click the "-" icon on the left of the interlocking gears icon to delete each partition, and then create another partition that fills all free space with the options as shown below.

screenshot of the menu to create a new partition in the Disk Utility application

Give the partition on your Transfer Device a descriptive name like “Transfer Device” and select the options as in the following screenshot:

screenshot of passphrase selection prompt in the Disk Utility application

You won't need to memorize this passphrase or type it more than a few times, so feel free to make a good long one. Then click Format to continue. The Disks utility will ask you if you are sure: click Format to continue. After a few seconds, your new Transfer Device should be ready for use. If you haven't already, make sure to label it.

Set Up the USB Transfer Device on Each Workstation

On each Journalist Workstation and Secure Viewing Station you'd like to use the Transfer Device you will securely save the passphrase on the persistent volume. This ensures that you will only have to type in the passphrase once during initial set up and it will be automatic thereafter:

  1. Insert the Transfer Device
  2. Go to Places ▸ Computer and click the USB drive in the left column.
  3. Type in the passphrase and click "Remember Password":

image of the disk unlock prompt on Tails

Remember to first do this on the Secure Viewing Station you just used to create the device!

After you've done this on each computer you wish to use the Transfer Device with, you're good to go!

  1. Tails screenshots were taken on Tails 3.0.1. Please make an issue on GitHub if you are using the most recent version of Tails and the interface is different from what you see here.↩