Discreete Linux is an operating system with the special purpose of protecting data (more precisely: people) against surveillance attacks with trojan software.

Since Edward Snowden has revealed the extent of the global surveillance of the world's population by governments and intelligence agencies, this threat has continued to grow. Besides the general monitoring of the Internet traffic, these activities in many countries also include targeted Trojan attacks on systems of politically unwelcome citizens or organizations. These attacks are often used by authorities to access sensitive data that is stored locally and encrypted on the computer and is not transmitted over the Internet or only in encrypted form.

With the QUANTUMTHEORY / FOXACID project, the Snowden documents showed a worldwide system of automated trojan infections. In the slides for the TURBINE project, the NSA states that it is designed to control Trojan infections "automated in millions of computers" - and that was the state of 2009. Today numerous commercial providers of surveillance tools are also selling Trojan software to dictatorships and states that proclaim torture.

The Discreete Linux project has the goal to provide a protection against these attacks for whistleblowers, human rights defenders, journalists, trade union and political activists and other targets of surveillance. It is therefore designed for ease of use by people without deeper computer knowledge but high security requirements. It creates a secure, isolated environment for processing and encrypting/decrypting sensitive data.

Even strong end-to-end encryption becomes worthless if the attacker can control the systems that perform the encryption. Discreete Linux brings the endpoints of encrypted communication out of reach of trojan attacks.