John McAfee, anti-virus guru and candidate for the Libertarian Party nomination for president, gave an interview this week that attempted to show just how foolish the FBI and Apple’s argument on privacy is.
[revad1]
The FBI and Apple have been locked in the grips of a debate over privacy and whether or not the tech company should create a backdoor into its device so authorities can investigate their contents. The FBI is seeking access to the phone of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters to see who he was communicating with and for what reason.
McAfee wrote an article for Business insider on February 18th in which he said he would decrypt the shooter’s iPhone for free and he’d have it done in 3 weeks – a disclaimer he now said was only a safety valve in case he got sick. In the article he says:
Cyberscience is not just something you can learn. It is an innate talent. The Juilliard School of Music cannot create a Mozart. A Mozart or a Bach, much like our modern hacking community,is genetically created. A room full of Stanford computer science graduates cannot compete with a true hacker without even a high-school education.
So here is my offer to the FBI. I will, free of charge, decrypt the information on the San Bernardino phone, with my team. We will primarily use social engineering, and it will take us three weeks. If you accept my offer, then you will not need to ask Apple to place a back door in its product, which will be the beginning of the end of America.
If you doubt my credentials, Google “cybersecurity legend” and see whose name is the only name that appears in the first 10 results out of more than a quarter of a million.
Now McAfee is doing everyone one better, going on Ed Shultz’s show on RT and giving the basics into how he’s break into the phone and even said it would take him and his team as little as 30 minutes to do so. The fact that the FBI can’t do this already is what McAfee is saying is the problem.
Here is a bit of what he said according to the International Business Times:
You need a hardware engineer and a software engineer. The hardware engineer takes the phone apart, and copies the instruction set [the phone’s mobile operating system and installed applications] and the memory. You then run a program called a disassembler, which takes the 1s and 0s and gives you readable instructions. Then the [software engineer] sits down and reads through it. What he is looking for is the first access to the keypad, because that is the first thing you do when you input your [personal identification number]. When he sees that, he reads the instructions for where in memory the secret code is stored.
You can watch McAfee’s full interview below:
Do you believe McAfee or is his yet another one of his over-the-top antics? Sound off in the comments below!
