John McAfee now says he lied about how he would hack an iPhone in order to “get a s—load of public attention.”
“By doing so, I knew that I would get a s—load of public attention, which I did,” McAfee said in a Monday interview with the Daily Dot. “My point is to bring to the American public the problem that the FBI is trying to [fool] the American public. How am I going to do that, by just going off and saying it? No one is going to listen to that crap.
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“So I come up with something sensational. … Now, what I did not lie about was my ability to crack the iPhone. I can do it. It’s a piece of friggin’ cake. You could probably do it,” he added.
Precisely what McAfee, a renowned cybersecurity developer and 2016 candidate for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, lied about is not clear to non-experts. He explained that it had to do with the extraction of a unique identifier from the physical hardware inside of a phone using acid and lasers, an error-prone process that he initially oversimplified.
“The lie was an exaggeration of simplicity,” McAfee said. “It would have been impossible in the time allowed to explain the fullness of the truth. If you fault me for that, then you, and possibly your readers, will have been the only one on the planet to have done so.”
McAfee added that it was “absurd … to focus on a simplification of a technique, given the stakes at risk — a potentially Orwellian state initiated by the populace ignoring the truth of what the [Federal Bureau of Investigation] is trying to do to us.”
The developer who created his eponymous brand of antivirus software said last month that he would hack an iPhone 5 used by perpetrators of the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., if the FBI requested his assistance.
“I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone,” he said at the time. “This is a pure and simple fact.”
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McAfee is not the only one who has suggested the FBI lacks the basic technical knowledge to hack a smartphone. FBI Director James Comey faced a lecture on the issue this month from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., after repeatedly saying he didn’t know how to hack a device in the manner Issa explained to him.
