When cybersecurity officer John McAfee wanted to run for the White House in 2016, he requested the Silicon Valley mantra from Steve Jobs in his chair video, celebrating unanimously: “Here are the crazy, confused, rebellious, troublesome, round pins in the middle holes. ”
McAfee, who was found dead in a Spanish prison on Wednesday by suicide, accomplished this – and more.
In his 75th year, a pioneer of antivirus software made and lost a lot of money, considered himself a libertarian politician, and then as a cryptocurrency victim – all of whom had repeated brushes with the law.
His death came just hours after the Spanish Supreme Court approved an application for dismissal of charges in the US, where he faced tax evasion charges. McAfee has been in prison in Barcelona since October, when he was arrested at the request of the US after he fled the United States in his boat, completing several flights from the authorities.
For many, McAfee’s nomadic life had plummeted into paranoia, violence and misery. He had just been falsely accused of being involved in a cryptocurrency embezzlement pump, and had been linked to officials killing his neighbor in 2012. His actions on Twitter and YouTube began to unravel.
But to the friends and fans he spoke to in the video, he was an anti-establishment champion – whose fears surrounding government-sponsored expertise and financial institutions show the skepticism of the authorities today.
“He always wants to create an online alternative that will not be at all flawed with the existing internet,” said Kim Dotcom, an internet businessman and co-accused who has been accused of one of the biggest human rights violations in history.
In his remarks McAfee, according to his Twitter profile, was “iconoclast” and “feminist, fun and secretive”.
McAfee in 1989. Its software became widely known because the risk of computer viruses increased © John Storey / Getty
McAfee in Guatemala, where he was later arrested and sent to the US © Joe Raedle / Getty
McAfee was born in 1945 in the UK army to a British woman and an American soldier who was there. A mathematician, McAfee quickly learned to use computers during the days of Nasa, Xerox and Lockheed Martin in the 1970s and 1980s.
He made his name with his virus control program, which became widely known because computer viruses began to threaten security. In 1994, he resigned as a senior, selling his McAfee value for $ 100m, the money he had lost during a financial crisis.
“Although John McAfee founded the company, he has not been with our company for more than 25 years,” said McAfee, who wrote at state markets late last year. “This tells us, we care about his family and those around him.”
Outside of support companies, millions have been shown to be at risk. Ten years after leaving McAfee, he started a game called “aerotrekking”, which involved flying the smallest planes on the tallest rocks in the desert. When tragedy struck in 2007, when a pilot died in a crash on his way to New Mexico, he hurriedly moved to Belize.
There, he began living in a “palace”, and began playing drugs, guns and girlfriends. This, too, did not end: in 2012, a neighbor, US citizen Gregory Faull, was shot dead in the head and McAfee was named “an interested person” in the case. Refusing to participate, he fled to neighboring Guatemala, where he was arrested and taken to the US. He was not charged with murder.
No libertarian who has never spoken to be done When reporters were asked to carry a handgun to “feel free”, McAfee resumed political activities. He first announced the White House’s bid for 2015 by his new party, the cyber, and later – not doing well – wanted a re-election for the Liberation Party in the 2016 election.
“His main focus in life was freedom,” said Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party, who met McAfee on the run in 2015.
“They know they’re cheating,” Istvan said in a statement. “She loves to be maverick and loves people. . . But when you sat down to eat and did not have it [journalists] to cover, I’m just really talking to a guy who’s amazingly bright. ”
McAfee told Spanish courts last week that his political intervention had taken place because he had exposed tax evasion in the US, and “he felt that only politics could get rid of them. [this]”.
McAfee purchase in South Beach, Miami, 2012 © TNS / ABACA / Reuters
McAfee cyber security conference in China in 2016 © Ng Han Guan / AP
Extreme skepticism over government and financial institutions also puts him at a disadvantage in a world free of cryptocurrencies. He soon became one of the first to spend money, and promised in 2017 to eat his penis “on national television” if the price of bitcoin does not reach $ 500,000 by mid-2020.
His enthusiasm for talking about cryptocurrency plans on Twitter also affected regulators. In March, he was charged with defrauding US officials. According to to complain, McAfee opted for other small currencies – including dogecoin – to promote in the media such as “day money” or “weekly money” in early 2018, buying them in advance and wasting money on the market as soon as it followed his ideas.
McAfee and others also earned $ 11m by posting the first few dollars on Twitter, for failing to make it clear that they were being paid for promotional work, regulators said.
On his last trip, McAfee fled the United States in 2019 on his boat after being sued by the Supreme Court for hiding millions of dollars in taxes between 2016 and 2018. His money was made possible, among other things, from his work on cryptocurrensets and selling life history rights. his, and was hidden by the guards.
Although he was finally imprisoned in Spain in October 2020, he did not give up fighting. In a high court in Spain last week, he said the tax cases in the US “encouraged politics”, as he used his political tactics to “denounce corruption” by the US Internal Revenue Service.
But the court rejected his convictions and on Wednesday morning granted his request for deportation to the United States, and McAfee met with the possibility of a lifetime imprisonment.
He leaves behind his wife Janice, a former employee who campaigned for his release with the release of “Free McAfee”.
Even after his death, McAfee was shocked at the incitement to the television chaos. For months, he had been falsely accused of leaving the world in the hands of the authorities. In a tweet in October, he wrote: “Know that if I hang myself… It won’t be my fault”.
About the day he died Wednesday, on his Instagram there was a sign that only showed the letter “Q” – which seems to refer to the QAnon plot, which led to the plot.
“All power is wasted,” he wrote in his final message on Twitter on Friday. “Be aware of the power that you will allow democracy to exercise.”
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