If by totally anonymous you mean that your Tor circuits are indistinguishable from all the others, at a technical level, that is true of all Tor clients, not just the one that runs on Tails. Of course, you can fuck that up at a level above the technical infrastructure. If you log into your Facebook or Gmail account, linked to your real identity, there's nothing Tor can do for you. If you post 600+ messages on a forum, like me , you're not technically anonymous, just pseudonymous, since all my previous posts can be linked to one identity, you just don't know who I am. What I suspect you mean is, can a local observer identify what I'm doing on the other end? I think that's what most people worry about, because they view the network backwards. The sites you visit can only see the exit node, they have no idea whether you're in America, England, Germany, or Pakistan. Your language might give you away, but that's another threat above the technical infrastructure. No, a local observer has no idea what you're viewing, and the site you're visiting has no idea who you are. That's the point of selecting 3 random nodes in the network. Tails doesn't make you more anonymous on the Tor network. It only prevents you from writing stuff to your hard drive. Full disk encryption offers a similar level of security, but that has nothing to do with anonymity.