Eccentric information security veteran John McAfee has announced his intention to run for US president in the election next year.
The founder of the eponymous anti-virus company, which Intel bought in 2010 for $7.68bn, announced his plans in a more subdued YouTube post than many are used to seeing him in.
“I live in a country that has passed so many laws that, at an average reading speed, would take me 600 years to read, reading 24 hours a day. I am protected by a government that invades my privacy so that it can assure me that I am not the enemy it is protecting me from,” he said.
“I live in a country that is governed by people largely illiterate in cybersecurity – as proven by the multiple government computer hacks. Yet cyber-warfare is now the means of war. My government is dysfunctional. For the 300 million other Americans – you are in the same boat with me.
“So stand with me to protect our freedom.”
McAfee will run for the newly formed Cyber Party which has as its rallying cry: ‘Protecting Privacy and Securing Freedom.’
It advocates a leaner approach to government with technology at its heart, as explained on its site:
“The goal of the Cyber Party is quite simple: we aim to speed up the rate the federal government adopts new technology, without sacrificing American freedom and privacy.”
McAfee founded his self-titled AV company in 1987 but resigned seven years later and sold his remaining shares two years after it went public.
Yet he jumped back into the public eye in a series of viral YouTube videos which saw him lampoon his colorful personal life.
In 2012 he was arrested in Belize for unlicensed drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon, although released without charge. But a few months later he was named by the local police as a “person of interest” in connection with the murder of neighbor Gregory Faull.
The Belize prime minister Dean Barrow has branded McAfee paranoid but the AV founder claimed the police would kill him if they handed himself in.
He was eventually deported from Guatemala to the US in December 2012.
Read Infosecurity's exclusive interview with John McAfee here.