06-24-2021, 02:20 AM
John David McAfee (/ˈmækəfiː/ MAK-ə-fee;[2][3] September 18, 1945 – June 23, 2021)[4][5] was a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and perennial political candidate. He founded the software company McAfee Associates in 1987 and ran it until 1994, when he resigned from the company.[6] McAfee Associates achieved early success as the creator of McAfee's first commercial antivirus software, and the business now produces a range of enterprise security software. The company was purchased by Intel in 2011, though it still bears the McAfee brand name. McAfee's wealth peaked in 2007 at $100 million, before his investments plummeted in the financial crisis of 2007–2008.
After leaving McAfee Associates, he founded the companies Tribal Voice (makers of the PowWow chat program), QuorumEx, and Future Tense Central, among others, and was involved in leadership positions in the companies Everykey, MGT Capital Investments, and Luxcore, among others. His personal and business interests included smartphone apps, cryptocurrency, yoga, and herbal antibiotics. He resided for a number of years in Belize, but returned to the United States in 2013 while wanted in Belize for questioning on suspicion of murder.[7]
McAfee was also a political activist. He unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and 2020.
In October 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain over U.S. tax evasion charges.[8] U.S. Federal prosecutors brought criminal and civil charges alleging McAfee failed to pay income taxes over a four-year period.[9][10]
On June 23, 2021, McAfee was found dead due to an apparent suicide by hanging in a prison cell near Barcelona shortly after his extradition to the U.S. was authorized by Spain.[11]
Legitimate career
McAfee was employed as a programmer by NASA's Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970. From there, he went to Univac as a software designer, and later to Xerox as an operating system architect. In 1978, he joined Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant. He worked for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton from 1980 to 1982.[16] In the 1980s, while employed by Lockheed, McAfee received a copy of the Brain computer virus, and began developing software to combat viruses.[citation needed]
In 1987, McAfee founded McAfee Associates, an anti computer virus company.[15] The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1992, and had its initial public offering the same year. In 1994, two years after McAfee Associates went public, McAfee sold his remaining stake in the company.[17] He had no further involvement in its operations.[6]
After various mergers and ownership changes, Intel acquired McAfee in August 2010.[18] In January 2014, Intel announced that McAfee-related products would be marketed as Intel Security. McAfee expressed his pleasure at the name change, saying, "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet."[19]
Other business ventures that were founded by McAfee include Tribal Voice, which developed one of the first instant messaging programs,[20] PowWow. In 2000, he invested in and joined the board of directors of Zone Labs, makers of firewall software, prior to its acquisition by Check Point Software in 2003.[21]
In August 2009, The New York Times reported that McAfee's personal fortune had declined to $4 million from a peak of $100 million due to the effect of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 on his investments.[17]
In 2009, McAfee was interviewed in Belize for the CNBC special "The Bubble Decade," in which it was reported that he had invested in and/or built many mansions in the USA that went unsold when the 2007 global recession hit. The report also discussed his quest to produce plants for possible medicinal uses on his land in Belize.[22]
In February 2010, McAfee started the company QuorumEx,[23] headquartered in Belize, which aimed to produce herbal antibiotics that disrupt quorum sensing in bacteria.[24][25]
In June 2013, McAfee uploaded a parody video titled How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus onto his YouTube channel. In the video, McAfee criticized McAfee's antivirus software while snorting white powder, and being stroked and undressed by scantily clad women. The video has garnered over 10 million views. McAfee told Reuters that he made the video to ridicule the media's negative coverage of him. A spokesman for McAfee Inc. called the video's statements "ludicrous."[26]
Also in 2013, McAfee started the company Future Tense Central, which aimed to produce a secure computer network device called the D-Central.[27] By 2016, it was also serving as an incubator.[28]
In February 2014, McAfee announced Cognizant, an application for smartphones, which displays information about the permissions of other installed applications.[29] In April 2014, Cognizant was renamed DCentral 1, and an Android version of it was released for free on Google Play.[30][31]
![[Image: 220px-John_McAfee_Def_Con_%2814902350795%29.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/John_McAfee_Def_Con_%2814902350795%29.jpg/220px-John_McAfee_Def_Con_%2814902350795%29.jpg)
At the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in August 2014, he warned Americans not to use smartphones, suggesting apps are used to spy on clueless consumers who do not read privacy user agreements.[32]
In January 2016, he became the chief evangelist for security startup Everykey.[28]
In February 2016, McAfee received media attention by publicly volunteering to decrypt the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooters, avoiding the need for Apple to build a backdoor.[33] McAfee later admitted that his claims of how simple cracking the phone would be were a publicity stunt, though he still claimed he could pull it off.[34]
In May 2016, McAfee was appointed chief executive chairman and CEO of MGT Capital Investments, a technology holding company. The company initially stated that it would rename itself John McAfee Global Technologies,[35] although this plan was abandoned due to a dispute with Intel over rights to the "McAfee" name.[36] McAfee changed MGT's focus from social gaming to cybersecurity, stating in an interview that "anti-virus software is dead, it no longer works," and that "the new paradigm has to stop the hacker getting in" before they can do damage.[37]
Soon after joining MGT, McAfee claimed that he and his team had exploited a flaw in the Android operating system that allowed him to read encrypted messages from WhatsApp.[38] Gizmodo investigated these claims, and reported that McAfee had sent reporters malware-infected phones to make this hack work. McAfee responded to these accusations, writing: "Of course the phones had malware on them. How that malware got there is the story, which we will release after speaking with Google. It involves a serious flaw in the Android architecture."[39]
McAfee also moved MGT into the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, saying that it was intended both to make money for the company, and to increase MGT's expertise in dealing with blockchains, which he thought was important for cybersecurity.[40]
In August 2017, McAfee stepped down as CEO, instead serving as MGT's "chief cybersecurity visionary." In January 2018, he left the company altogether. Both sides stated that the decision was amicable, with McAfee saying that he wanted to spend all of his time on cryptocurrencies, while the company stated that they were getting pressured by potential investors to disassociate themselves from McAfee.[41]
On August 13, 2018, McAfee took a position of CEO with Luxcore, a cryptocurrency company focused on enterprise solutions.[42]
Questionable activities:
On November 12, 2012, Belize police started a search for McAfee as a "person of interest" in connection to the murder of American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull. Faull was found dead of a gunshot wound on November 11, 2012, at his home on the island of Ambergris Caye, the largest island in Belize.[80][81] Faull was a neighbor of McAfee's.[82] In a November 2012 interview with Wired,[83] McAfee said that he has always been afraid police would kill him, and thus refused their routine questions; he has since evaded the Belizean authorities.[82] Belize's prime minister, Dean Barrow, called McAfee "extremely paranoid, even bonkers."[84] McAfee fled Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder.[85][86][87]
The magazine Vice accidentally gave away McAfee's location at a Guatemalan resort in early December 2012, when a photo taken by one of its journalists accompanying McAfee was posted with the EXIF geolocation metadata still attached.[88] While in Guatemala, McAfee asked Chad Essley, an American cartoonist and animator, to set up a blog so that McAfee could write about his experience while on the run.[89] McAfee then appeared publicly in Guatemala City, where he unsuccessfully sought political asylum.[90]
On December 5, 2012, McAfee was arrested for illegally entering Guatemala. Shortly afterward, he was placed under arrest, and a board to review McAfee's plea for asylum was formed. The committee denied his asylum, so he was taken from his holding facility to a detention center in order to await deportation to Belize.[91]
On December 6, 2012, Reuters and ABC News reported that McAfee had two minor heart attacks in a Guatemalan detention center and was hospitalized.[92][93] McAfee's lawyer stated that his client had not suffered heart attacks, but had instead suffered from high blood pressure and anxiety attacks.[94][95][96] McAfee later said he had faked the heart attacks while being held in Guatemala, to buy time for his attorney to file a series of appeals that ultimately prevented his deportation to Belize, thus hastening the government's decision to send him back to the United States.[97]
On December 12, 2012, McAfee was released from detention in Guatemala, and deported to the United States.[98]
On November 14, 2018, the Circuit Court in Orlando, Florida, refused to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against McAfee for Faull's death.[99][100]
U.S. finance charges, arrest in Spain, and planned extradition[edit]
In January 2019, McAfee announced that he was on the run from U.S. authorities, and living internationally on a boat following the convening of a Grand Jury to indict him, his wife, and four of his 2020 Presidential campaign workers on tax-related charges.[101] The IRS has not independently confirmed the existence of these charges.[101]
On October 5, 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice for tax evasion. The indictment alleges he earned millions of dollars from 2014–18, but has failed to file income tax returns.[102]
On October 6, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint alleging that McAfee had fraudulently promoted certain ICOs.[103] According to the SEC, McAfee presented himself as an impartial investor when he promoted the ICOs, despite the fact that he was allegedly paid $23 million in digital assets in exchange for the promotions.[103]
On March 5, 2021, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that they had formally indicted McAfee and an executive adviser for allegedly fraudulently promoting certain cryptocurrencies and performing pump and dump schemes. McAfee was incarcerated in Spain, pending extradition to the United States.[104][105]
On June 23, 2021, the Spanish National Court authorized the extradition of McAfee to the United States, for criminal charges in Tennessee.[6] McAfee died a few hours later.[106] The New York extradition case was still pending in a lower Spanish court.[6]
The night after McAfee arrived in the United States after being deported from Guatemala in December 2012, he was solicited by Janice Dyson, then a prostitute in South Beach (Miami Beach).[107] The two spent the night together. Despite Dyson being more than 30 years McAfee's junior, McAfee and Dyson subsequently began a relationship, and married in 2013.[108]
In 2013, McAfee claimed that the former cocaine baron "Boston" George Jung was writing his official biography, No Domain.
mostly from Wikipedia
After leaving McAfee Associates, he founded the companies Tribal Voice (makers of the PowWow chat program), QuorumEx, and Future Tense Central, among others, and was involved in leadership positions in the companies Everykey, MGT Capital Investments, and Luxcore, among others. His personal and business interests included smartphone apps, cryptocurrency, yoga, and herbal antibiotics. He resided for a number of years in Belize, but returned to the United States in 2013 while wanted in Belize for questioning on suspicion of murder.[7]
McAfee was also a political activist. He unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and 2020.
In October 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain over U.S. tax evasion charges.[8] U.S. Federal prosecutors brought criminal and civil charges alleging McAfee failed to pay income taxes over a four-year period.[9][10]
On June 23, 2021, McAfee was found dead due to an apparent suicide by hanging in a prison cell near Barcelona shortly after his extradition to the U.S. was authorized by Spain.[11]
Legitimate career
McAfee was employed as a programmer by NASA's Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970. From there, he went to Univac as a software designer, and later to Xerox as an operating system architect. In 1978, he joined Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant. He worked for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton from 1980 to 1982.[16] In the 1980s, while employed by Lockheed, McAfee received a copy of the Brain computer virus, and began developing software to combat viruses.[citation needed]
In 1987, McAfee founded McAfee Associates, an anti computer virus company.[15] The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1992, and had its initial public offering the same year. In 1994, two years after McAfee Associates went public, McAfee sold his remaining stake in the company.[17] He had no further involvement in its operations.[6]
After various mergers and ownership changes, Intel acquired McAfee in August 2010.[18] In January 2014, Intel announced that McAfee-related products would be marketed as Intel Security. McAfee expressed his pleasure at the name change, saying, "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet."[19]
Other business ventures that were founded by McAfee include Tribal Voice, which developed one of the first instant messaging programs,[20] PowWow. In 2000, he invested in and joined the board of directors of Zone Labs, makers of firewall software, prior to its acquisition by Check Point Software in 2003.[21]
In August 2009, The New York Times reported that McAfee's personal fortune had declined to $4 million from a peak of $100 million due to the effect of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 on his investments.[17]
In 2009, McAfee was interviewed in Belize for the CNBC special "The Bubble Decade," in which it was reported that he had invested in and/or built many mansions in the USA that went unsold when the 2007 global recession hit. The report also discussed his quest to produce plants for possible medicinal uses on his land in Belize.[22]
In February 2010, McAfee started the company QuorumEx,[23] headquartered in Belize, which aimed to produce herbal antibiotics that disrupt quorum sensing in bacteria.[24][25]
In June 2013, McAfee uploaded a parody video titled How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus onto his YouTube channel. In the video, McAfee criticized McAfee's antivirus software while snorting white powder, and being stroked and undressed by scantily clad women. The video has garnered over 10 million views. McAfee told Reuters that he made the video to ridicule the media's negative coverage of him. A spokesman for McAfee Inc. called the video's statements "ludicrous."[26]
Also in 2013, McAfee started the company Future Tense Central, which aimed to produce a secure computer network device called the D-Central.[27] By 2016, it was also serving as an incubator.[28]
In February 2014, McAfee announced Cognizant, an application for smartphones, which displays information about the permissions of other installed applications.[29] In April 2014, Cognizant was renamed DCentral 1, and an Android version of it was released for free on Google Play.[30][31]
![[Image: 220px-John_McAfee_Def_Con_%2814902350795%29.jpg]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_McAfee_Def_Con_(14902350795).jpg)
At the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in August 2014, he warned Americans not to use smartphones, suggesting apps are used to spy on clueless consumers who do not read privacy user agreements.[32]
In January 2016, he became the chief evangelist for security startup Everykey.[28]
In February 2016, McAfee received media attention by publicly volunteering to decrypt the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooters, avoiding the need for Apple to build a backdoor.[33] McAfee later admitted that his claims of how simple cracking the phone would be were a publicity stunt, though he still claimed he could pull it off.[34]
In May 2016, McAfee was appointed chief executive chairman and CEO of MGT Capital Investments, a technology holding company. The company initially stated that it would rename itself John McAfee Global Technologies,[35] although this plan was abandoned due to a dispute with Intel over rights to the "McAfee" name.[36] McAfee changed MGT's focus from social gaming to cybersecurity, stating in an interview that "anti-virus software is dead, it no longer works," and that "the new paradigm has to stop the hacker getting in" before they can do damage.[37]
Soon after joining MGT, McAfee claimed that he and his team had exploited a flaw in the Android operating system that allowed him to read encrypted messages from WhatsApp.[38] Gizmodo investigated these claims, and reported that McAfee had sent reporters malware-infected phones to make this hack work. McAfee responded to these accusations, writing: "Of course the phones had malware on them. How that malware got there is the story, which we will release after speaking with Google. It involves a serious flaw in the Android architecture."[39]
McAfee also moved MGT into the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, saying that it was intended both to make money for the company, and to increase MGT's expertise in dealing with blockchains, which he thought was important for cybersecurity.[40]
In August 2017, McAfee stepped down as CEO, instead serving as MGT's "chief cybersecurity visionary." In January 2018, he left the company altogether. Both sides stated that the decision was amicable, with McAfee saying that he wanted to spend all of his time on cryptocurrencies, while the company stated that they were getting pressured by potential investors to disassociate themselves from McAfee.[41]
On August 13, 2018, McAfee took a position of CEO with Luxcore, a cryptocurrency company focused on enterprise solutions.[42]
Questionable activities:
On November 12, 2012, Belize police started a search for McAfee as a "person of interest" in connection to the murder of American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull. Faull was found dead of a gunshot wound on November 11, 2012, at his home on the island of Ambergris Caye, the largest island in Belize.[80][81] Faull was a neighbor of McAfee's.[82] In a November 2012 interview with Wired,[83] McAfee said that he has always been afraid police would kill him, and thus refused their routine questions; he has since evaded the Belizean authorities.[82] Belize's prime minister, Dean Barrow, called McAfee "extremely paranoid, even bonkers."[84] McAfee fled Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder.[85][86][87]
The magazine Vice accidentally gave away McAfee's location at a Guatemalan resort in early December 2012, when a photo taken by one of its journalists accompanying McAfee was posted with the EXIF geolocation metadata still attached.[88] While in Guatemala, McAfee asked Chad Essley, an American cartoonist and animator, to set up a blog so that McAfee could write about his experience while on the run.[89] McAfee then appeared publicly in Guatemala City, where he unsuccessfully sought political asylum.[90]
On December 5, 2012, McAfee was arrested for illegally entering Guatemala. Shortly afterward, he was placed under arrest, and a board to review McAfee's plea for asylum was formed. The committee denied his asylum, so he was taken from his holding facility to a detention center in order to await deportation to Belize.[91]
On December 6, 2012, Reuters and ABC News reported that McAfee had two minor heart attacks in a Guatemalan detention center and was hospitalized.[92][93] McAfee's lawyer stated that his client had not suffered heart attacks, but had instead suffered from high blood pressure and anxiety attacks.[94][95][96] McAfee later said he had faked the heart attacks while being held in Guatemala, to buy time for his attorney to file a series of appeals that ultimately prevented his deportation to Belize, thus hastening the government's decision to send him back to the United States.[97]
On December 12, 2012, McAfee was released from detention in Guatemala, and deported to the United States.[98]
On November 14, 2018, the Circuit Court in Orlando, Florida, refused to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against McAfee for Faull's death.[99][100]
U.S. finance charges, arrest in Spain, and planned extradition[edit]
In January 2019, McAfee announced that he was on the run from U.S. authorities, and living internationally on a boat following the convening of a Grand Jury to indict him, his wife, and four of his 2020 Presidential campaign workers on tax-related charges.[101] The IRS has not independently confirmed the existence of these charges.[101]
On October 5, 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice for tax evasion. The indictment alleges he earned millions of dollars from 2014–18, but has failed to file income tax returns.[102]
On October 6, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint alleging that McAfee had fraudulently promoted certain ICOs.[103] According to the SEC, McAfee presented himself as an impartial investor when he promoted the ICOs, despite the fact that he was allegedly paid $23 million in digital assets in exchange for the promotions.[103]
On March 5, 2021, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that they had formally indicted McAfee and an executive adviser for allegedly fraudulently promoting certain cryptocurrencies and performing pump and dump schemes. McAfee was incarcerated in Spain, pending extradition to the United States.[104][105]
On June 23, 2021, the Spanish National Court authorized the extradition of McAfee to the United States, for criminal charges in Tennessee.[6] McAfee died a few hours later.[106] The New York extradition case was still pending in a lower Spanish court.[6]
The night after McAfee arrived in the United States after being deported from Guatemala in December 2012, he was solicited by Janice Dyson, then a prostitute in South Beach (Miami Beach).[107] The two spent the night together. Despite Dyson being more than 30 years McAfee's junior, McAfee and Dyson subsequently began a relationship, and married in 2013.[108]
In 2013, McAfee claimed that the former cocaine baron "Boston" George Jung was writing his official biography, No Domain.
mostly from Wikipedia
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.