JOHN MCAFEE: Either President Obama’s cybersecurity advisors are incompetent, or our enemies have planted agents at the highest level of our government
John McAfee, Contributor
BusinessInsider.com
Mar. 12, 2016
John McAfee is running for president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed he wrote and gave us permission to run.
I cannot accept the possibility that a sitting US president would willingly and knowingly hand our country over to our enemies, lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps I am more naive than I think, but my mind cannot possibly conceive that.
Yet, President Obama, in his speech at SXSW, is suggesting that we do exactly that by creating backdoors into encryption.
He couched his proposition in terms of privacy versus security, yet that issue pales to utter insignificance compared to the real issue; ease of access to criminal activities by our government versus the total annihilation of America by China, Russia or any other hostile state that will be given access to all of America’s secrets through that same backdoor.
For here is the issue, any master key or backdoor to software or encryption that is given to the US government will reside in the hands of our enemies within a matter of weeks of its creation. This is an absolute truth that no cybersecurity expert can deny. And I cannot accept that our sitting president understands this and is still willing to carry it out. I will not accept it.
The implication, then, is this: either Obama’s cybersecurity advisors are incompetent beyond all measure or our enemies have succeeded in planting subversive agents at the highest level of our government. To assume the latter requires more courage than I possess, so I must assume, no matter how shocking it sounds, that Obama’s cybersecurity advisors have not kept up with the dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape of the world of cybersecurity. It would partially explain, at least, why the US is hopelessly behind China and Russia in cybersecurity.
How do we, as cybersecurity professionals know that such a backdoor would be in the hands of our enemies, and for that matter in the hands of every black hat hacker in the world, in a matter of days? It is simple: We are talking about software. A secret key, or backdoor, would be detected by the first hacker that got his or her hands on the phone or the piece of encryption software in question. And how?
The Rest…HERE
