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.”
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Matt Buchanan
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