The Tor Project has merged operation with Tails, a Linux-based portable operating system that uses Tor to protect users from digital surveillance. Tor, a global non-profit that develops tools for online privacy and anonymity, will incorporate Tails into its structure for simpler collaboration, “better sustainability, reduced overhead, and expanded training and outreach programs to counter a larger number of digital threats,” according to the Tor Project. The move comes as regulatory forces heighten efforts to break end-to-end encryption. Tor emphasizes the alliance will “strengthen both organizations’ ability to protect people worldwide from surveillance and censorship.”

“By joining forces, these two privacy advocates will pool their resources to focus on what matters most: ensuring that activists, journalists, other at-risk and everyday users will have access to improved digital security tools,” Tor Project Communications Director Pavel Zoneff wrote in a blog post.

“Merging the Tor Project and Tails makes a great deal of sense, given their respective focus on online privacy and anonymity, not to mention their shared history,” TechCrunch reports. “It could also prove a boon for those most at-risk in a world that’s moving closer to 24/7 digital surveillance, with … anyone vulnerable to online tracking being a potential benefactor.”

The Tails team can now offload much of its administrative and infrastructure load and “focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of the Tor Project,” explains Tor.

For its part, Tor can gain from further integrating Tails into its privacy network. “Tor’s encryption mechanism not only blocks attempts to eavesdrop on web traffic but also makes the traffic more difficult to trace,” writes SiliconANGLE.

Tor is short for “The Onion Router,” a global project that created the famous Tor Browser. Connectivity to the Tor network “routes all incoming and outgoing traffic through a series of three IP addresses,” thus ensuring “that no one can determine the IP address of either originating or destination party,” per Ars Technica.

Launched in 2006, the Tor network runs on a protocol “developed by the Naval Research Laboratory in the early 2000s,” Ars Technica explains, noting that “Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a portable Linux-based operating system that runs from thumb drives and external hard drives and uses the Tor browser to route all web traffic between the device it runs on and the Internet,” routing through the Tor network.