https://youtu.be/aDTKKmBjlwE
In
this episode of Politicking, political activist, tech pioneer and CEO of
MGT Capital Investments John McAfee joins Larry King to bring us his
valuable insight regarding issues of cybersecurity and the ominous
encroachment of mass surveillance and vulnerability of big government
agencies. But first, Bill Marczak, senior research fellow at the
Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto's School of Global Affairs,
explains his frightening discoveries in the field of phone-commandeering
spyware in the course of his activism with Bahrain Watch.
Following
the release of an FBI report outlining Russia’s alleged role in hacking
the 2016 election, Larry King sat down to talk with tech pioneer John
McAfee to discuss the current state of cybersecurity.
McAfee
is no stranger to cybersecurity. As the developer of the first
commercial antivirus program, he has been a major player in the industry
for the past 50 years. He is also the CEO of MGT Capital Investments,
and an outspoken former presidential candidate for the Libertarian
Party.
Based
on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were
behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John
Podesta’s emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he
told RT, “if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you
it was not the Russians.”
The Joint Analysis Report from the FBI contains an appendix that lists hundreds of IP addresses that were supposedly “used by Russian civilian and military intelligence services.”
While some of those IP addresses are from Russia, the majority are from
all over the world, which means that the hackers constantly faked their
location.
McAfee argues that the report is a “fallacy,”
explaining that hackers can fake their location, their language, and
any markers that could lead back to them. Any hacker who had the skills
to hack into the DNC would also be able to hide their tracks, he said
“If
I was the Chinese and I wanted to make it look like the Russians did
it, I would use Russian language within the code, I would use Russian
techniques of breaking into the organization,” McAfee said, adding that, in the end, “there simply is no way to assign a source for any attack.”
However,
McAfee does see a problem with the National Security Agency (NSA) being
able to listen in on every conversation and read every text message and
email of every American. Rather than focusing on disrupting the bad
guys in foreign countries, McAfee thinks that “all of that effort has been placed on a country that is afraid of its own citizens.”
He
claims that the only way he has been able to fully block the NSA from
infecting his phone with spyware is by using a flip-phone too old to be
hacked. He even goes as far as to call the iPhone the “ultimate spy device.”
As for the future, McAfee’s biggest fear is that the role of the NSA will change under a President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump wants the DOJ to head a national task force of law enforcement agencies to create our cybersecurity,” he says.
McAfee
predicts that if President-elect Trump follows through with that
intention, the FBI will end up heading the NSA, as they are the lead
technologists within the DOJ.
McAfee thinks that idea is a recipe for disaster, warning “we don’t need one more attacker, that attacker being our own government.”
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