Anti-virus guru John McAfee. (photo: Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press/AP)
John McAfee's New Widget to Thwart the NSA
05 October 13
It’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.”
That technology, D-Central, is something that McAfee has been
“working on for five years, very slowly,” he said, in a phone interview
the other day. But “what accelerated this was Snowden.” He explained,
calmly, in the voice of practiced salesman, “I’ve known for years that
we’re all being watched, but now everybody knows.” D-Central, McAfee
says, will occlude government surveillance by creating a series of
local, decentralized, and encrypted wireless networks on which users can
safely and anonymously trade files and messages.
The details are intentionally hazy, but the over-all project, as
McAfee explains it, is somewhat complex because of its decentralized
nature. Each box is sort of like a wireless router, except that it
doesn’t connect to the Internet directly. It broadcasts a local wireless
network that laptops, smartphones, and tablets can connect to through
an app; the network, which McAfee claims has a quarter-mile range in
rural areas, or three blocks in a city, relies on a “different
transmission technology” than Wi-Fi, and doesn’t use the traditional Internet Protocol
to communicate. Each box has a public mode and private mode. Anybody in
the area can join a public network and communicate with any other
users—in fact, much of the point is that the dynamics of each network
change constantly as people move in and out, making them hard to track,
particularly since the public mode uses “no I.D.s whatsoever,” McAfee
says. Anonymity is provided in part by being one of many in a faceless
crowd. Once somebody is connected, he can use the D-Central app to
broadcast files or messages to everybody else in the public network.
“Each of these local networks can connect through relays to other local
networks,” McAfee explains. If enough of them were chained together,
they could potentially blanket an entire city with a large,
interconnected public network.
(It’s worth noting that McAfee is not the first to conceive of a
project oriented around local, de-centralized networks. One, an
open-source project called Occupy.here, had its roots in Occupy Wall Street. This past spring, its creator, Dan Phiffer—who is now a developer at The New Yorker—“began
stashing Wi-Fi routers wherever I could find an electrical plug near a
freely accessible space,” resulting in a series of isolated points where
people in close proximity can connect wirelessly. And in Red Hook,
Brooklyn, J. R. Baldwin created a mesh network to provide connectivity to the neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, to name a couple of examples in New York City.)
While no D-Central box connects directly to the Internet, within each
city “we will have hubs that connect through the Internet,” McAfee
says. The relay system—from network to network to the hub—would allow,
for instance, the transmission of a file or a message from a network in
one city to one in another, through the Internet. To do that, though, a
user would have to toggle over to a private mode, in which each person
would have a unique identifier generated by the software on his or her
device, allowing a file from someone in Los Angeles, for example, to
find its way to a specific person in Denver. While the file, which will
be encrypted, could be tracked as it moves across the public Internet
from one city hub to the other, McAfee says it would be impossible to
track who ultimately gets the file—only that it moved from L.A. to
Denver. Because Future Tense doesn’t keep any records, McAfee says “we
don’t know where in Denver.” He adds, “We don’t want to know.” Users
could then move files from the private mode into the public sphere, if
they chose.
“The app will have a whole lot of different functions,” McAfee said.
He then described a series of potential real-life scenarios involving
the app. In one, as you walk by a restaurant that has a D-Central device
broadcasting, the app on your phone can then tell you, for instance,
they “don’t have gravy on their French fries,” so you know to keep
walking past. In another, people in traffic receive alerts on their
device, via a relay system, that an accident lies just up ahead. In sum,
as McAfee has described it, D-Central is a separate, parallel
quasi-Internet where anybody can share anything or communicate,
peer-to-peer—with little fear of being surveilled. “I think college kids
will line up and fall all over themselves to get it,” as will security
businesses, he says.
But there are serious, unanswered questions about D-Central’s
security. For one, McAfee won’t discuss its “private” encryption scheme
in detail, because, he claims, “it’s very hard to keep an uncrackable
encryption if you share it with the government.” What McAfee volunteered
was that it uses “a very radical technique” that he “came up with
during my first programming job at General Electric in the late
nineteen-sixties” and that it is “extraordinarily fast.” For emphasis,
he added, “I’m not a neophyte in this area.” However, security experts
generally recommend open-source software and encryption schemes,
precisely because security flaws cannot be hidden, ultimately making
them more secure.
Another question is what kind of data the government will be able to
glean about the service’s users and what they share. Though at one point
during the interview McAfee stated that no records are kept, he also
said that “barring a court order no one is going to find anything out
about you,” implying that there is some user data vulnerable to
government seizure. And while it’s fair for McAfee to say that “I’m not
trying to circumvent the law here,” in that he is willing to comply with
court orders or government requests, it’s worth noting that the Obama
Administration has repeatedly emphasized the legality of the N.S.A.
surveillance programs D-Central is ostensibly designed to circumvent.
We’ll know more in six months, when McAfee promises “to demonstrate
physically to the world the viability of this system.” A team of seven
is building the device, including Jim Zoromski, a longtime McAfee
lieutenant who held a similar position in QuorumEx, the company McAfee
started to produce a miracle antibiotic in the jungles of Belize.
Despite the capital-intensive challenges of both developing the device
and mass-producing enough of them to keep manufacturing costs low—and
claims that he was broke in December—McAfee
says that D-Central is “definitely self-funded” and that he “will not
under any circumstances consider traditional venture funding.” He is,
however, open to crowd-funding, which he thinks “might be fun.”
Photograph by Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press/AP.
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