What John McAfee Taught Us About Privacy
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Dear privacy seekers,
John McAfee was a larger-than-life figure whose recent death, supposedly of suicide, is a tragedy, but also an opportunity to discuss a man who believed wholeheartedly in the necessity of privacy and, I suspect, would want us to carry on his legacy. McAfee was one of the first people to understand the opportunity and danger of interconnected systems. He was a pioneering discoverer of computer viruses and among the first to develop a solution in the form of McAfee Antivirus, which was immensely successful and which gave him the wealth that would fund his inimitable life of intrigue, adventure, and globe-trotting. During his last years he gave interviews and recorded many videos explaining his view of the world, his support of cryptocurrencies, his skepticism of all forms of government, and his insistence on the importance of privacy. Having followed the man’s life for the last decade and listened to a few too many of his videos, I want to summarize seven key lessons on privacy that McAfee taught us.
Mr McAfee: requiescat in pace.
1) Privacy is a lifestyle
John McAfee didn’t just talk about privacy: he lived it. In many cases he gave up contemporary conveniences such as smart phones and easy city living. McAfee also recognized the importance of boating as a means to privacy and freedom. Waterways are much less regulated and controlled than airways and roads, and allow a clever waterman to escape internationally under the cover of darkness without anyone being the wiser. Boats also allow one to be in control and thus to attain a certain degree of sovereignty. Just ask the owners of the boat that makes up the Principality of Sealand. McAfee spent a lot of time in these international waters. He even ran a presidential campaign from his boat while avoiding the IRS and the US government. Along the way he was fairly careful not to reveal his location during numerous interviews, news stories, and recorded videos. He did mess up once when a reporter whom he had invited to his hideout in Guatemala failed to remove the GPS coordinates—the EXIF data—from a photo he took of McAfee. McAfee seemed to learn his lesson; in his final years as a fugitive from the US he recorded his videos in indistinct surroundings. He also spent money on armed guards and arming himself. I wish we could know more about McAfee’s techniques of secrecy, but that would have defeated the point. He seems to have spilled some of these secrets in a blog in which he writes with great insight about the art of bribing Latin American policemen and using fake press IDs. All of this he figured out through practice. As a targeted man McAfee knew that he couldn’t just talk the talk like 99% of privacy advocates do. He had to walk it.
2) Privacy-Seeking is an International Affair
Another thing McAfee understood was how to play countries off of each other. One benefit of nationalism is that it creates competition among governments. France and Russia are known for not extraditing people within their borders—particularly to the US—and this they do out of national pride. McAfee made the mistake of hiding in Spain—not exactly a bastion of this behavior—where he was caught and imprisoned for alleged tax crimes in the US. McAfee should have known better and, well, he did. When the US initially came after him he fled by boat to places such as Cuba, which he believed would be uncooperative with US authorities. Earlier in his life when he was accused of murder by a crooked Belizian government, he fled beyond its borders in a story worthy of Hollywood. In yet another instance he faked a stroke in Guatemala to buy his lawyers time to ensure he would not be deported to the US. For the most part McAfee was one step ahead. He had at least two passports—British and US—which he would use as the situation favored one or the other. He traveled everywhere and made acquaintances along the way, including many in the crypto community. During an extended stay in the United States he also played his geo-arbitrage card as best he could among the states, living in rural Tennessee to reduce his tax obligations and reside in a state known for leaving people alone. A fugitive and a vagabond in the earth was McAfee, and a well-practiced one at that. Alas to fall so short in the end.
3) Privacy is Protection from the State
McAfee was a proponent of limited government, the only political philosophy that can support privacy. His videos address eloquently how power corrupts as well as the functioning of the deep state—those unelected federal bureaucrats who create the majority of laws in a country—and about the danger of trusting governments that supposedly exist for the “general welfare.” While he was critical of Big Tech for their betrayal of the freeing potential of technology, McAfee was very good at explaining that the only thing companies like Facebook and Google could do is to advertise to him. The government, on the contrary, could and did harass him, imprison him, steal from him, and in all likelihood murder him. Facebook did not lock up John McAfee for not giving it money.
4) Privacy is Made Easier with Wealth
McAfee understood that wealth can bring one many things, privacy not the least of which. Summoning his best impression of reclusive multi-billionaire Howard Hughes, McAfee used his wealth to get around the world, to organize his crazy life as he wanted, to hire help when he needed it, and pay people to make things happen. And, like Hughes, McAfee purposefully drew attention to himself wherever he went. Does anyone think that, had McAfee not spent a career criticizing governments and taxation and instead bought an island off of Indonesia and spent his years there, he would not still be with us today? For those who seek privacy, criticizing the powers that be is not a winning proposition. Living instead like The Millionaire Next Door—not overtly displaying ones wealth—can lead to a long life of satisfaction. The fame-seeking side of McAfee invited journalists to his hiding spot to expose him. The wiser side of John McAfee used a war chest to buy boats, consultants, convincing false documents, and to stay off the radar. Money fostered McAfee’s international boat-fueled lifestyle and allowed him to be an owner instead of a renter: a crucial distinction in the pursuit of privacy and freedom. Finally, it allowed him to obtain privacy cryptocurrencies, which fluctuate wildly, and to live an expensive life with Monero, which he used for crypto hotels and any number of other goods. For anyone seeking freedom and privacy, the accumulation of wealth is a useful tool in your arsenal.
5) Privacy Involves Cryptocurrencies
McAfee was a lot of things, but above all he was a passionate believer in and user of cryptocurrencies. He will go down as one of the most eloquent teachers of the power of cryptocurrencies to transform the world. Quite simply, good cryptocurrencies allow purchases and sales to be made without any third party. Cryptocurrencies completely cut out the banking system and governments from the equation. McAfee appreciated Bitcoin, but only as a precursor to privacy coins such as Monero, which was his drug of choice. Bitcoin, as we know, has a public ledger that can offer some anonymity if purchased in that way, but which can also expose ones wallet to any curious onlooker. For anyone who has doubts about cryptocurrency, go buy a small amount—privately—and see what kind of ideas it instills in you. McAfee thrived on this stuff, and saw in cryptocurrencies the only way to regain privacy in our financial lives and consequently to reclaim privacy in our political lives.
6) Privacy Requires One to Be Master of Technology
It’s been said that there will be two types of people in the future: those who give instructions to computers and those who receive instructions from computers. McAfee would have agreed with this. He understood that in the digital age, to be conversant in technology was the key to achieving any measure of privacy. McAfee was a cybersecurity rockstar in his time, but even more impressive is that he stayed knowledgeable into his 60s and 70s. Many people of McAfee’s age are fearful of computers, believing that they exist to cause confusion, and relishing the victim status that means they don’t have to do the basic work of understanding. McAfee understood the importance of computers early on and continued to learn throughout his life. He even put his creative energies into a number of privacy projects: a few too many to the point that they did not take off. McAfee spent time to understand the fundamentals of computing and networking, which he simply had to update and refresh throughout his life. He kept his technological mind sharp and it served him well. As a 75 year-old McAfee went around posting on Twitter, paying in Monero, and lecturing people fifty years his junior about the significance of technological advances. It was for this reason that McAfee was able to achieve privacy in the digital age: he was the master of technology and not its slave.
7) Privacy is a Means to an End
McAfee understood that privacy is a means to an end and not an end itself. Many privacy seekers today go to great lengths to become invisible without ever asking what it is for and what the end goal is. Privacy for such people is a game, a lifestyle, like wearing a hipster fedora and believing it makes one subversive instead of perfectly conformist. McAfee didn’t play these games. Privacy was a tool for him and was jettisoned when it was not desired or hindered his higher purposes. Many of his interviews and speeches are punctuated by an insistence that the key thing in life is to find what we love to do and who we love to do it with. Here is a man viewed as criminal, hero, Indiana Jones, mentally unstable clown, predator, national security threat. Privacy allowed him to be any of these things. His own quirky personality—just watch any of his interviews in the last two years—is a testament to how wholly he broke the mold and the expectations that the tyranny of the majority foists upon us. Marcus Aurelius once said that “the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” A conformist McAfee was not, and separation from his home country and from society at large was key to it. This is what privacy allows. Imagine any new idea or unique personality coming from a hive organism or from a collectivist society. It is by breaking away from the crowd, cordoning oneself off in a basement—for a time—that fosters the human imagination and the eccentricity that makes life a pleasure. Privacy for McAfee was a means to adventure, an opportunity to wear masks and explore without fear of consequence. But he never assumed that privacy was the goal, because it wasn’t. It isn’t. Privacy is the tool, and life is the object.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet
https://watchmanprivacy.com