Skip to main content

John McAfee says he can NSA-proof your communications for $100

john mcafee says the ashley madison hack was an inside job c2sv
Image used with permission by copyright holder

What if I told you that, in less than a year, you will be able to purchase a $100 device that completely shields you from the prying eyes of the NSA and any other snoops who might take a peek at your online activity? Would you buy?

John McAfee, the wild geezer of tech, says he has precisely such a device in the works. In exactly 173 days (at the time of publication), McAfee plans to release something he calls D-Central through one of his newest ventures, Future Tense.

As McAfee, who founded (and then sold) McAfee Antivirus back in the early 90s, described it during an interview at the C2SV Technology Conference + Music Festival this past weekend, D-Central would create a “localized, dynamic network” for each user. These networks would have a wireless range of about three city blocks in urban areas, or a quarter-mile “in the country,” McAfee said.

D-Central acts like a mini Internet – a ‘dark Web’ sub-layer – that you can carry around with you wherever you go.

Any D-Central users within range of this network would be able to communicate with one another and share files. The networks would be encrypted, he said, and users could choose to remain anonymous. Most importantly, D-Central would not have fixed parameters – meaning it moves with you as you move, presumably making it more difficult for hackers and spies to track you down.

McAfee says D-Central is a “round, little thing” that can fit in your pocket or backpack. It can be used for communicating with friends, or anonymously with strangers. Through the help of an iPhone, Android, or PC app, D-Central can also be used for sharing files, like “the latest MP3,” or “a picture of some girl you think is cute.” Users can also post requests for certain types of files or other content, and other users within a D-Central network can respond to those requests by sharing files anonymously. It is also possible to communicate with other D-Central networks over the Internet through encrypted connections.

In other words, as I understand it, D-Central apparently acts like a super-secure, long-range, mobile local area network (LAN). You could also think of it like a wireless hotspot that creates its own mini Internet, which is only accessible through the D-Central app. Then, in addition to the private network created by D-Central, the device also has the ability to connect to the wider Internet (what you’re using right now) through an encrypted connection, which also allows you to connect your D-Central network to other D-Central networks, creating a new “dark” sublayer of the Internet that is only accessible to D-Central users. At least, that’s our best guess.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know enough technical details to say exactly how D-Central will work – if it will work. All of this is pure speculation based on the tidbits provided by McAfee. The damn thing could cook meth, for all we really know at this point.

John McAfee
Image used with permission by copyright holder

McAfee, who fled his home in Belize last year due to a pesky murder investigation, says he’s been working on D-Central for a number of years, but accelerated development of the device following Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.

“I can’t get out of [cyber]security; for some reason, it’s party of my brain – part of my thinking,” said McAfee. “And we don’t have much any more, certainly not in the online world.”

Because the NSA “helped create every single encryption algorithm we use,” he says, the agency “can get access to whatever they want” – a claim that may be hyperbolic, but not as far off as you might think. Furthermore, he says, NSA has “the power and the muscle” to “coerce” companies like Google or Verizon to hand over your personal data, which is clearly true.

Worse, says McAfee, we have “hackers” who can get “anything that they want” through the Internet, and may be a far bigger threat to most people than a government agency that reportedly creates maps of Americans’ social connections and stores metadata on millions of Web users for up to a year, along with all the rest.

“I’m 68-years-old,” said McAfee. “And if you can just give me any small amount of information about yourself, I promise you, within three days, I can turn on the camera on your computer at home and watch you do whatever you’re doing.”

“If you can just give me any small amount of information about yourself, I promise you, within three days, I can turn on the camera on your computer. …”

“If I can do it, any idiot can do it,” he added. And it’s idiots like these, as well as NSA agents, who would purportedly find themselves thwarted by McAfee’s D-Central devices.

Who the hell knows whether D-Central will ever come to market? The “teaser” website for the device doesn’t exactly instill confidence. Plus, even if D-Central does turn out to be something anyone can buy, it’s impossible to know whether it will deliver on McAfee’s promises. Not to mention the fact that it sounds like the perfect device for sharing all sorts of nefarious content – even McAfee admits as much – which would put it firmly in the sights of every shade of law enforcement under the Sun.

Finally, there’s McAfee himself; writing the man off as a drug-fueled lunatic with too much money and a sex addiction hits many people as a reasonable gut reaction. (Perhaps this has something to do with that?) But I for one hope he’s onto something great – D-Central may turn out to be the only route we have toward a future in which “privacy” still appears in the dictionary.

Many of us still want the option of online privacy – to keep our digital lives on lockdown when we choose, and to let it all out on Twitter or Facebook when we don’t – but we no longer seem to have that choice. NSA snoops and hackers apparently have access to our data and – more often – the process for securing our privacy is far too confusing for a good chunk of us to handle. What we need is a simple solution – a silver bullet – that changes the dynamic of the out-of-control Internet we must all use. And a straightforward product like D-Central, or a similar project like Occupy.here, could provide just that: A way to know for certain when the privacy option is switched to “on.”

So here’s to hoping that McAfee isn’t as out there as he so often seems to be, that D-Central really will arrive in six months, and that it will create these cool private local networks that McAfee describes. But like the rest of you, I won’t be holding my breath.

Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more