John McAfee's New Widget to Thwart the NSA

By Matt Buchanan, The New Yorker

05 October 13

t's been nearly a year since most people have thought about John McAfee, the permanently bleary-eyed antivirus pioneer who may now be more famous for his exploits in the jungles of Central America than for the software that bears his name. That's what happens when your life becomes an odyssey of drugs, guns, young women, corruption, the promise of a miracle antibiotic, a secret laboratory, a government raid, a murder, a manhunt, and a healthy dose of paranoia. After being deported from Guatemala, where he sought asylum after fleeing authorities in Belize, he arrived back in the United States last December.

For the next several months, McAfee kept what would pass for a low profile in his world, relocating to Portland, Oregon, before slowly beginning to reëmerge, starting with a USA Today interview this past May, in which he stated that he is "just tired of technology." In June, he released an intensely self-deprecating four-and-a-half-minute video, "How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus," which took the image of McAfee as a drug-addled, gun-toting, oversexed "eccentric millionaire" to its absolute extreme; it was a promotional video for his Web site, whoismcafee.com, which has been relaunched as a one-stop shop for all things McAfee, from press mentions to a cheeky F.A.Q. (Sample question and answer: "Do you do Bath Salts?" "Do my words, my constructs or my trains of thought in any way indicate a drug addled mind?")

On Sunday, at the C2SV conference in San Jose, McAfee announced his latest company, Future Tense, along with its first product, called D-Central, a screenless, pocket-sized encrypted networking box that will cost less than a hundred dollars. In his profile of McAfee for Wired, Joshua Davis notes that "his success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack." McAfee, of course, always had a solution. In the eighties, it was computer viruses; a few years ago, it was antibiotics; today, it's the N.S.A. and government surveillance. Future Tense's Web site-which feels like a promo for a New Age medical treatment, with a bizarre soundtrack and pulsing purple clouds-warns that "information privacy and freedom are at risk" before promising "a new and revolutionary technology" from "the mind of John McAfee."