The words of John
Why should we protect our privacy? And why does its preservation matter more than ever in the middle of the digital age? In this piece, I explore the question through the lens of a cybersecurity pioneer: the legendary John McAfee.
This week, McAfee died. John McAfee.
More than the creator of an antivirus, he was a sui generis and polemic character — as if he had been lifted from a novel written in 2050. A cyberpunk Rambo.
In recent years, McAfee promoted privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies and decentralized exchanges as a way to escape government control over our economic freedom. That contentious stance fed the morbid fascination of the masses on Twitter, where hordes of admiration mixed with thousands of accusations of total insanity. He was a polarizer.
Still, whatever the singular events that marked his private life, he held firm political views against authoritarianism of any kind. His staunch libertarian conviction made him an enemy of many governments.
Breaking the law of men was his hobby. He was imprisoned 21 times in 11 different countries. More recently, McAfee defied the United States by not filing his tax returns for over eight years. He considered the practice unconstitutional and a form of theft — a common protest among many Americans, grounded in that same legal argument. This and other accusations led to his arrest.
In his fugitive's journey, he escaped police custody in the Bahamas, was imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, and passed through Cuba and the United Kingdom. He was finally captured in 2020 at a Spanish airport while trying to fly to Turkey.
In one of his last tweets, he left a reflection on the corruption that comes with power. Love, compassion, and generosity do not need power, he said; they come from the heart. Greed, envy, and anger, on the other hand, feed on it. In other words: power corrupts, even democracies.
And the importance of privacy…
Source: BBC.com
In the paragraphs above, I only wanted to set some context for the subject of this piece.
While reading the BBC's review of McAfee's grim death — in police custody, à la Epstein, and hours from being extradited to the United States — I came across a gem: a video of a talk he gave on the importance of privacy.
Whether you liked McAfee or not, the following words carry weight, and they are inspiring.
Without further ado, here is the transcription:
What I want to talk about is something very dear to my heart, privacy, and the eroded nature of privacy in our lives today. Google -or at least certain people within Google (I'm not going to mention names because I'm not a rude gentleman)- would like us to believe that if we don't have anything to hide, we should not mind if everyone knows everything that we do. I have to take a serious issue with that. If everyone knew everything about everyone else, what would human behavior become? We would be limited to the least common denominator of human behavior: those behaviors that no one would find offensive. You need to think this through. Sometimes I hear people say over and over again: I don't care, I have nothing to hide. It's not a matter of hiding anything. Here's the issue: unless you are willing to stand up, to take a stand, do something, we are all lost. We've done this because we're lazy. We want the ease of living. We want comfort in our lives. We'd rather be safe, secure, and comfortable than actually live and go out there and suffer, and find out what life is all about. I am just as guilty as you are. We cannot have intrusions into our lives and still have freedom. And freedom is all I have -and all you have, if you think about it. — John McAfee