Greetings,
I have been reviewing various different security and privacy oriented Linux and BSD distros. It seems like the most secure and private distros that I have seen thus far (Liberte and Tails) you can't even install to hard drive but must use them as a "live cd" only. I am needing an OS with this level of security and privacy features yet can be installed to a hard disk. Any suggestions?

Thanks

That Liberte and Tails can't be installed to HD is part of their security concept. You can't alter read-only media like CDs and DVDs, so it is impossible install a rootkit or replace binaries with compromised versions. Installing them to a harddisk makes them less secure, so it is not intended.

Anyways, any Linux distribution/BSD (with some exclusions, like Puppy) can be set up to be secure and have options for increased privacy. OpenBSD is known for its main focus being security, so I would start with that.

You can install any live cd to a hard drive but it may still act like a live cd. For example LPS can be put on a usb or hard drive but the squash file is not writable.

Distro's are not secure. Some of the BSD's make some pretty good claims (maybe well worth it) but that is OS only. When you start adding in apps you get more and more holes with each app.

If you want a more secure installable OS, you should look into OpenBSD and Hardened Gentoo.

They're not 100% perfect, in fact, no system is 100% including LiveDisks, but they represent efforts to focus more on security and stability than pumping out packages. Just about any distribution that focuses on stability and has a good security handling policy of issuing updates as required for security can be fairly effective.

However even then, any system can be fairly secure if you have a well made security policy that is tested, has proper security clearance levels for users, locks down certain services and ports, utilizes jails and control groups to limit resources and sandbox problematics, and other things.

ALL os's are secure or INSECURE
it depends on how one sets it up

I would use CentOS 6.5 with full disk encryption
keep SE set to enforcing and targeted
uninstall unneeded services and programs

lock up firefox ( look into Tor-bundle)

Hmm, why can't Puppy Linux be made secure?

Puppy is a single user system by design, you are always root.