Early life

McAfee was born in the United Kingdom on September 18, 1945 on a U.S. Army base, and raised in Salem, Virginia. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 and an honorary Doctor of Science from Roanoke College in 2008.

Ventures

Before McAfee Associates

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 1980-1982. In the 1980s, while employed by Lockheed, McAfee received a copy of the Brain computer virus and began developing software to combat viruses.

McAfee Associates

In 1987 McAfee founded McAfee Associates, a computer anti-virus company. In 1989, he quit Lockheed and began working full-time at McAfee Associates, which he initially operated from his home in Santa Clara, California. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1992, and McAfee resigned from the company in 1994. Two years after McAfee Associates went public, McAfee sold his remaining stake in the company.

Network Associates was formed in 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. The Network Associates company name was retained for seven years, when it was renamed McAfee, Inc. In August 2010, Intel bought McAfee, maintaining the separate branding, until January 2014, when it announced that McAfee related products will be marketed as Intel Security. McAfee expressed his pleasure at his name no longer being associated with the software.

After McAfee Associates

Other business ventures that were founded by McAfee include Tribal Voice, which developed one of the first instant messaging programs, PowWow. In 2000, John McAfee 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.

In August 2009, The New York Times reported that McAfee's personal fortune had declined to $4 million from a peak of $100 million, the effect of the global financial crisis and recession on his investments.

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.

Beginning in February 2010, McAfee started a new venture in the field of bacterial quorum sensing. His company QuorumEx has its headquarters in Belize and is working towards producing commercial all natural antibiotics based on anti-quorum sensing technology.

In 2013 McAfee started a new company, Future Tense Central, to produce a secure computer network device called the D-Central.

In February 2014, McAfee announced Cognizant, an application for smartphones, which displays information about the permissions of other installed applications. On April 3, 2014, John McAfee rebranded Cognizant as DCentral 1, and released an Android version for free on Google Play.

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.

As of January 2016, McAfee is running an incubator called Future Tense Central and he is also the chief evangelist for security startup Everykey.

On 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. McAfee later admitted that these claims were a publicity stunt.

In May 2016, McAfee was appointed Chief Executive Chairman and CEO of MGT Capital Investments. The company announced that it will be renamed John McAfee Global Technologies. During this time, 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. 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."

Politics

2016 presidential campaign

On September 8, 2015, McAfee announced that he would seek the office of President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, as the candidate of a newly formed political party called the Cyber Party. On December 24, 2015, he re-announced his candidacy bid, saying that he would instead seek the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party. On the campaign trail, McAfee consistently polled among the top three presidential candidates for his party with his rivals Gary Johnson and Austin Petersen. The three candidates appeared in the Libertarian Party's first nationally televised presidential debate on March 29, 2016. On April 1, John McAfee announced that his vice presidential choice would be the photographer and entrepreneur Judd Weiss.

Political positions

McAfee identifies as a libertarian, advocating for the decriminalization of cannabis and an end to the War on Drugs, non-interventionism in foreign policy and a free market economy which does not redistribute wealth and upholds free trade. McAfee supports abolishing the Transportation Security Administration.

McAfee advocates for increased cyber awareness and more action against the threat of cyberwarfare.

McAfee has advocated for religious liberty, saying that business owners should be able to deny service in cases that contradict their religious beliefs, saying that "No one is forcing you to buy anything or to choose one person over another. So why should I be forced to do anything if I am not harming you? It's my choice to sell, your choice to buy."

Personal life

In a 2012 article in Mensa Bulletin, the magazine of American Mensa, he stated that being the developer of the first commercial anti-virus program has made him "the most popular hacking target", confiding: "Hackers see hacking me as a badge of honor". He added that for his own security he has other people buy his computer equipment for him, uses pseudonyms for setting up computers and logging in, and changes his IP address several times a day.

In 2012, when asked if he personally uses McAfee anti-virus, he replied: "I take it off," and, "It's too annoying."

In early 2013, McAfee was residing in Portland, Oregon, but he has since moved to Lexington, Tennessee, with his wife Janice Dyson.

McAfee claims that former cocaine baron "Boston" George Jung is writing his official biography, No Domain.

McAfee has taught yoga and has written several books about yoga.

Legal issues

On April 30, 2012, McAfee's property in Orange Walk Town, Belize, was raided by the Gang Suppression Unit of the Belizean Police Department. McAfee was in bed with his girlfriend at that time, who McAfee said was traumatized by the incident. A GSU press release stated that McAfee was arrested for unlicensed drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon. He was released without charge. In 2012, Belize police spokesman Raphael Martinez confirmed that McAfee was neither convicted nor charged, but only suspected.

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. Faull was a neighbor of McAfee. In a November 2012 interview with Wired, 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. Belize's prime minister Dean Barrow called McAfee "extremely paranoid, even bonkers". McAfee fled Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder.

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. While in Guatemala, McAfee asked Chad Essley, an American cartoonist and animator, to set up a blog so that he could write about his experience while on the run. McAfee then appeared publicly in Guatemala City, where he attempted to seek political asylum. On December 5, 2012, McAfee was arrested for illegally entering Guatemala. Shortly after being placed under arrest, 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.

On December 6, 2012, Reuters and ABC News reported that McAfee had two minor heart attacks in a Guatemalan detention center and was hospitalized. McAfee's lawyer stated that his client had not suffered heart attacks, but had instead suffered from high blood pressure and anxiety attacks. McAfee later stated that he faked the heart attack while being held in Guatemala to buy time for his attorney to file a series of appeals that ultimately prevented his deportation to Belize, hastening the government's decision to send him back to the United States. On December 12, 2012, McAfee was released from detention in Guatemala and deported to the United States.

As of January 2014, Belizean police have presented no new accusations, and they have not persisted in seeking McAfee's imprisonment for any of the crimes they accused him of. However, they have auctioned off McAfee's seized assets, and his home was burned down under suspicious circumstances.

On August 2, 2015, McAfee was arrested in Henderson County, Tennessee, on charges of one count of driving under the influence and one count of possession of a firearm while intoxicated.

In popular culture

Stephen Rodrick wrote in the October 2015 issue of Men's Journal that McAfee's "stay in Belize is so notorious that there is a libidinous, perhaps insane, gun-wielding character living in Belize in novelist Jonathan Franzen's Purity that bears a resemblance to McAfee."

[ Source: Wikipedia ]