Brax.Meby Rob Braxman — March 10, 2020
He tips a glass of yellowish liquor to his lips and says “Do you mind if I drink this?” I said “sure. No problem.” Then he refills it with a square bottle of premium Tequila which I guessed to be Patron.
Good image, I laughed to myself. Not quite the English James Bond. Maybe with a Latino edge.
John McAfee. Libertarian candidate for President of the United States. and candidate for Vice President as well, creator of McAfee Antivirus, hacker, cybersecurity guy, entrepreneur, architect, pilot, pianist, magician, yachtsman, gun advocate, cryptocurrency evangelist, and subject of a movie to be released this summer. “What did I miss in this long list?”, I said.
“Not much” he responded and then told me the brief story of the last 7 months. First flaunting his bohemian lifestyle in the Caribbean on his Yacht, then getting jailed in the Dominican Republic for 4 days. According to him, it was because of a request by the US government that he be repatriated back to the US. “Our lawyers worked on that and got us out because I’m a British citizen, I have a British passport and I also have a US passport.”
He was pushed out of Cuba and the Bahamas as well because the US Government wanted him packed on a plane to US territory but these countries did not want to get involved.
So he fled to London and that became the official beginning of his life as Jason Bourne. On the run.
John McAfee was born in 1945 at the tail end of World War II at a US Army base in the United Kingdom. His mother was English and his father was American. And this explains his dual passport status.
After the Caribbean debacle, he arrived in London in the near fall of 2019, and apparently stayed at a hotel that accepted cryptocurrencies. We discussed this and cryptocurrencies later. Then soon after, he apparently felt the heat of the US government and disappeared again. And then he reappeared in some wintery-looking location that he claimed was a hardened communications safe house.
Someone on Twitter outed him and said “You’re in Iceland!” And posted a picture of the exterior of a restaurant in the Northern part of Iceland. McAfee posted curses in anger at the doxxer that gave his location and said he’s going to be on the run again.
And for the next several months, we saw scenes of him in places that looked like different parts of eastern Europe, Russia, Germany, Italy. We saw him flying his helicopter supposedly to all these places. And constantly reporting when he felt that he was feeling the heat of the chase and disappearing again.
And thus that marked him, in my mind, as Jason Bourne brought to real life. Except, the Jason Bourne character was always hidden. He would just pop out of nowhere.
John McAfee is a Jason Bourne on social media. He has 1 million followers on Twitter. Before cryptocurrencies tanked in 2018 he was famous for his crypto statements and predictions. He was so famous as a crypto evangelist that he actually moved markets for alt-coins (non-Bitcoin) cryptocurrencies just from his tweets.
Hardly a day passes without him posting one of his eye opening shock tweets. And exaggerations are always on the menu.
“Half of what I post on social media is disinformation”, he says. And true enough, John McAfee is the disinformation master.
Was he actually even in Iceland at the time that the doxxer squealed his location? As we will find out, his location is his most guarded secret. Whatever he posts on social media has to be looked at with an eye for Poker since you can never tell at the moment if he’s serious or not.
“If I post a picture, they can tell the location but not the time”, he claims. “Sometimes I go back to social media several times a day to make sure I did it right.”
“Like when we went to Munich a couple of months back but I delayed when I posted it on social media.” True enough he recently tweeted that he was ready to schedule meetups with local people at the location in the picture. “Wear a red scarf” he says to those interested in the meetup at 5pm the following day. Then the reactions from social media came from well-wishers asking why he’s revealing his location and from naysayers saying he’s so stupid for posting his current location.
There is one thing I understood completely before I spoke to John McAfee. This man is definitely not stupid. He graduated with a mathematics degree in 1967. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Mathematics in 2008. And has worked for NASA, designed operating system software for UNIVAC, then operating systems with Xerox, followed by stints at Computer Science Corporation, and Booz-Allen Hamilton. These last few are known as contractors for the intelligence community so we can guess that his roles there were likely top secret. But I didn’t ask.
He subsequently founded McAfee Associates and created the McAfee Antivirus. The company was purchased by Network Associates and went public and two years later (in 1994) he abruptly ended his involvement and began enjoying his mega-millionaire status. He would later say that these kinds of events (becoming rich) can’t be planned and it happens by luck and a willingness to take risks.
There are many aspects of John McAfee’s life that many will be interested in honing on, like his time in Belize and the subject matter of the upcoming movie “King of the Jungle” with Michael Keaton playing a supposedly crazy John McAfee character.
But I was more interested in learning about his Jason-Bourne-like activities so I focused my interview on that.
“We don’t have phones”, says John. “Phones will be used to spy on us. These devices are made to track every move you make.” And true enough, in a reflection on his glasses, I could see that he was having his interview with me not on a cell phone but with a desktop computer. I thought he may have used an Android without a sim card.
“Aren’t you worried”, I asked, “that your voice has been voice-printed and now they’ve recognized my Skype session as being with you and that they’re now tracking your IP address?”
“No I’m not worried. My IP address is hidden by a private network. It can’t be identified. This is not some $79 a year VPN you download from Google!” I responded that I think I know what kind of network he was using and that it’s not something I discuss on my show because it’s illegal.
“It’s not illegal here! I don’t do anything illegal!”. We both laughed.
I’ll try to explain what I think he’s on. Instead of a commercial VPN with a known list of servers, I know that hackers have hacked into private computers of many people in the world with bad cybersecurity practices. These computers are now part of a botnet. Instead of computers doing things like perform denial of service attacks on the Internet infrastructure, these bot computers silently function as routers. So Internet traffic is bounced through these unwitting computers using home networks and forwarded as needed. Since the attacker is not known and the routing software was written by hackers, it will not leave a trace and the Internet activity will seem to come from a random list of computers.
In theory, the hacker that created the botnet would have committed a crime in the US since they took over a computer that does not belong to them. But in many countries, like in Russia, it is not illegal to hack someone in another country. Is McAfee using this kind of private network? I didn’t press him on it, but it’s an example of one that is not identifiable compared to some aspects of a VPN or TOR which may not be immune to intelligence agencies.
He continued to explain that his current space has radio frequency jammers all over and railed over how Wifi can be tracked up to 35 miles away. Now this required some thinking on my part about his intent on the jammers.
The issue with Wifi signals is that the probe and response signals of mobile devices has created this location tracking system in the world called Wifi-triangulation. By a call and response, each device identifies itself with a unique serial number (known as a MAC address) and that is tagged to a GPS location which is then able to identify the precise location of every device in the world. This probe response in the airwaves occurs multiple times each second for every router and every device Wifi adapter.
If your mobile device listens for these Wifi announcements, then it will be able to triangulate your position. And this can be done by anyone with a mobile device near you including neighbors, the postman, and the UPS delivery driver. And there I realized that if someone blocked the Wifi probes within an area, then mobile devices will not report a location. And similarly a signal can be sent to spoof GPS satellite frequencies which then prevents GPS from being used in the area.
If that’s what he’s doing, then that’s already very smart. There may be other threats that his jammers are intended to stop and may be more advanced than I can imagine but this is my assessment based on what I know.
In my thinking about Jason Bourne movies, I immediately remember the cameras at the train stations and the banks where facial recognition is triggered and a tag is automatically sent to an intelligence agency somewhere. I asked John specifically about his fears about facial recognition.
“There are developed countries without an extensive camera surveillance system”, he says. He claimed that he’s currently in Belarus in some past tweet. Given his penchant for disinformation, I acknowledge that he’s around the area but that’s all I will believe. He frequently mentions being near the Black Sea at some points in time on Twitter. Then shifts to the Baltic Sea.
In one tweet he posted that he has oysters for breakfast everyday. At first I thought that tweet was to show his luxurious lifestyle but as he admitted in the interview, the oysters were made to suggest that wherever he is has an abundance of oysters. “Those oysters have no name, or location.” But my guess is that he was suggesting a location.
In any case, he says he avoids city centers. He suggests that places like a Belarus will not have a lot of cameras, especially out of the city and that he and his wife Janice are not easily recognizable in the way they dress or move around. And apparently the purposely make an effort to to be visible. “Sometimes I wear an actual mask!”, he claims.
In his tweets, he also acknowledged and showed his body doubles. In fact one of the people jailed on his behalf in the Caribbean was actually a body double.
Still I wonder about facial recognition technology especially since he claimed to have returned to London recently as well as to Munich. Both places are known to have extensive camera surveillance systems.
And partly, in his tweets, he says he has researched the laws and that extradition requests take time before any action is taken. I imagine that even if found via a surveillance camera, he is not wanted in those countries, so he has some lead time to disappear. Being on the run requires complex planning.
Why is he being hunted down? Supposedly a US Grand Jury indicted him, likely for tax evasion since he admits he has not paid taxes in many many years. But he thinks that part of it is that they claim he’s inciting people to not pay taxes by his push for cryptocurrencies, creating a crypto exchange without following KYC (know your customer laws) and specifically supporting anonymous crypto like Monero.
“I don’t use credit cards”, he says. “When we went to London, we stayed at a hotel that specifically required crypto”, he says. “If someone hires me to promote crypto or be a consultant, they have to pay me in Monero or it won’t work out. I pay for everything in Monero. The government wants you to use Bitcoin since they can track that. Or they’ll create their own crypto and say use this new crypto instead. But Monero is untrackable. If you don’t want to pay taxes, then this is the currency to use since no one can tell.”
I can make this observation: even if one’s goal is not to evade the IRS, having John McAfee maintain what clearly looks like a luxurious lifestyle using only Monero as his currency, surely suggests that cryptocurrencies must have gone mainstream. And that’s why he’s a crypto-currency hero to so many.
One of his shock tweets was this: “I’m good enough to find anything that was typed or spoken within 10 feet of a cellphone or covert receiver, any time since 2012, anywhere in the world covered by cell service.”
I asked him specifically about this because I wanted to know if he has knowledge or direct access to such a database. But I always know to temper my understanding of his tweets. He explained how our cell carriers can capture the information of what we say, not in voice form but as keywords and how this is stored in databases so that someone can find out who said a particular word.
Now this is a known thing. Keyword tracking on the Internet and having that data filtered and sent to the NSA was published in a Guardian story about AT&T and its keyword and IP detection technology, likely triggered by information from Edward Snowden.
“There’s no more privacy, people!”, he says. “Your Samsung TV is listening to you. Not because they’re interested in what you’re doing in bed with your spouse but they want to know what you think of the show you just watched. They want to know if you’re grumbling about it after the broadcast.”
This I’m sure is in reference to the Wikileaks release of CIA hacking tools which included the fact that Samsung TV’s have been used to listen in to people.
Clearly he’s given up on having any sort of privacy and says he doesn’t care about the data collection of Google, Apple, and Facebook.
I asked him specifically about Gmail. “Gmail reads your messages”, I said. Yes, he acknowledged that the Google AI reads it, looks for key words and not necessarily humans reading the content. But apparently his wife Janice got warned by Google that a District Attorney was getting copies of her emails. “If they’re doing it to her, then they’re doing it to me too, which is great because it’s a way to pass them disinformation!” So to him the advance warning given by Gmail makes Gmail particularly valuable to him, and he can make multiple accounts.
What about encrypted messaging? “What is the point of encrypted messaging? Those were good 25 years ago! But now, you go to pornhub and watch a video and someone drops a keylogger on your device and watches what you do!”, he says emphatically. He’s talking here about a hack known as a RAT (Remote Access Trojan that can capture keystrokes and watch your screen).
Being such a public figure, John McAfee’s motivations and requirements are not the same as normal people interested in privacy. He will never get privacy because he can be recognized worldwide.
But clearly he realizes that his security comes from being very secretive about his location and anything he reveals about that is intentional.
John McAfee is a candidate for President of United States under the Libertarian party. So I asked him what his expectations are and what his platform is because as he stated over and over, he does not expect to win.
“Frankly who wants that job? The President has no power! In this world whoever has the information has the power!”
He tells this story which he has explained himself on Twitter. The CIA head goes to the President and says “Mr. President, I’m sorry to tell you that we’ve found that Iraq is in possession of nuclear weapons and has a missile capable of delivering it to our ally the United Kingdom. Sir, I don’t envy being in your position to have to decide a matter like this but we have to bomb Iraq to the stone age to stop this.”
“Now what is a President supposed to do? He has no choice so 4 hours later Iraq is bombed to the stone age”, McAfee says.
Now this story is of course inaccurate historically. Iraq was not accused of having nuclear weapons but of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) which in this case were chemical products like Sarin gas and it was capable of being delivered by ballistic missile. However, inaccuracies aside, he made the point that by manipulating how information is presented, someone in the intelligence agencies can control a president. Of course, it was determined now that Saddam Hussein did not in fact have chemical weapon stockpiles though it was used to trigger the Iraq war during the time of the first President Bush.
McAfee continued to theorize, “John F. Kennedy wanted to dismantle the CIA and then he was shot. Bobby Kennedy’s platform also included a plan to shutdown the CIA and he was killed. Richard Nixon wanted to reduce the CIA and he resigned.”
“CIA people are lifetime employees. They call presidents ‘Transients’ because they’ll be gone in 4 years. The President has no power! So who wants to be in this position? But the my only platform is to get the American people to wake up!”
I had a great time interviewing John McAfee. I thought he was a gentleman, respectful but authentic at all times. He did not back down from the frequent swearing and the enjoyment of his Tequila cocktail.
From what I understand, he himself was employed by the intelligence community and has hinted that, without specifically admitting to it. Though clearly some of those entities he worked for early in his career were intelligence agency contractors.
At one point, he said on Twitter that the intelligence agencies were trying to kill him; this while showing himself recovering at a hospital from some sort of poisoning. Publicly his main public fight is with the IRS. However, during the interview, he stated that the poisoning attempts on his life has been from associates and business dealings and not connected to the 3-letter intelligence community. So at least now we get clarity on that.
Still, the hunt for Jason Bourne continues and his followers continue to watch the drama unfold day to day on Twitter.
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Rob Braxman Tech is a Youtube creator https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYVU6rModlGxvJbszCclGGw and is known as the Internet Privacy Guy. He specializes in topics specific to cybersecurity and privacy. This interview was intended to be a Youtube video but due to technical failures on the video, it’s being released as a feature story.
Rob is a long time software architect and founder of Brax.Me, an open-source privacy focused social media platform, as well as many enterprise systems. He is also a top VIP broadcaster on Periscope/Twitter and is a Radio personality frequently guesting at WBZ Radio in Boston.