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"I know that the press has portrayed me alternately as a mad genius, and a mad psychotic genius," said John McAfee. Having heard him talk I can safely say that I don't know which of these is accurate.
Not all the speakers at Defcon appear on the printed schedule. There is one complete track where the only schedule is a handwritten notice appearing outside the hall every morning and a .info website updated during the course of the day. No video or recording are allowed. "If we find you with an operating recording device, we will break it, then we will break you, and we will leave the smoldering remains outside the door as a warning to others," we were told. Skytalks is the con within a con where you get to hear the really cool stuff. This was where, the word went out, John McAfee was going to be talking and answering questions. In the end the talk was moved to a larger room, and even then when I got there half an hour early there was standing room only.
I was familiar with some of McAfee's story from news reports: being accused of murder in Belize, hiding from law enforcement, and eventually fleeing the country. However, I had not heard McAfee's version of the backstory to this. He told us how the government of Belize had tried to extort money from him, and when he refused had tried intimidation. He claims to have responded by donating a large number of high end laptops to the Belize government, knowing they would be appropriated by government officials. However, the story goes, he had loaded them up with spyware, and now has thousands of hours of recordings implicating the government in corruption, assassination, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. They managed to get wind of this and decided to frame him for murder.
According to McAfee, his enemies in the Belize government are now trying to assassinate him - his phones are continually being hacked, and he is being followed by cars with no license plates. Truth? Or paranoid fantasies? Either way, it would make a great movie. I see McAfee being played by Harrison Ford.
Undaunted by all this, McAfee is still developing software. There's DCentral1, an Android app that surveys your other Android apps and reports on how intrusive the permissions request are, and a forthcoming consumer complaints web site, thebrownlist.com. After his talk, he offered photo ops for anyone who wanted to be seen with him. I couldn't resist, though the security screening to get close to him was considerably tougher than the time I went to a book signing by Salman Rushdie.
