John McAfee. John McAfee John McAfee is running for US president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed article he wrote and gave us permission to run.

America's cybersecurity is fragmented, inconsistent, and dysfunctional. Terrorist attacks occur as if they were lightning strikes — unpredictable and indefensible. Yet this is not true.

Mathematical models exist, using pattern recognition, point-set topology, and Boolean algebra, that can easily identify every terrorist cell on earth within minutes of the cell's organization — providing that sufficient raw data is available.

In addition to identifying terrorist cells, these formulas could predict a nation's troop movements, military plans, political moves, and nearly everything else — without having to read a single word of communication, parse a single sentence, or intercept a single message.

I'll leave the explanation for later in the article.

I first want to ask a question. Why has no one asked why the Chinese have chosen their specific US targets for cybertheft? Doesn't it seem odd, for example, that they wanted the personnel records of everyone who has worked for the US government for the past 50 years? They could just have easily, believe me, walked off with the top-secret plans for our next nuclear bomber, but they chose personnel records.

The 21 million records they took could not easily be used to monitor every person's conversations, emails, and messages. As the NSA has discovered, the volume of such information is simply too large for any current means of analysis. When the standard practices of "disinformation," which almost everyone now uses to some extent, is factored in, all of the supercomputers in the world combined could not handle it.

The Chinese are clearly doing something orders of magnitude more subtle and powerful than our own government's covert agencies are doing.

America is stuck in the ancient paradigm that listening to conversations and reading communications will somehow be effective against a global threat such as terrorism.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's like trying to cut down a forest by seeing only a single tree.

The Chinese, in stark contrast, by their very actions and through what hackers on the Dark Web have gathered, couldn't care less about what individuals are saying to one another or directing one another to do. They view governments and other agencies as entities that have an embodied existence of their own and that they manifest actions and movements as a single organism.

China's cyberhackers. via Flickr

If this view is correct, then data of a higher order is required. This is similar to the way physicians, when diagnosing a patient's ailment, do not concern themselves with the chemical communications between individual cells in the patient's body; they concern themselves with symptoms that transcend anything a few cells could manifest — body temperature, coughing, sneezing, internal bleeding, etc.

The Chinese, then, must be concerned with metaphorically similar signs within governments and agencies. These signs are called "patterns."

Let's oversimplify and take a look at what patterns can tell us. Let's assume that we are able to monitor the phones of a husband and wife and the only information we have are the phones' locations, whether a call is being placed, and the time and duration of the call.

And, of course, the assumption that the husband and wife keep their phones on them at all times.

Let's say that with regularity, the husband places a call whenever the wife is out of hearing range and quickly hangs up just before the wife returns to hearing range. This pattern might be sufficient information to assume with a high probability that the husband is having an affair, or possibly has a gambling problem. If at this point a single additional data point is added — the number being called — and it is discovered to be the wife of a neighbor, or a gambling parlor, then it's clearly time for a sit-down.

This is vastly oversimplified compared with discerning the internal machinations of a government, but the principles are the same.

With five data points:

Who is making a call

Whom are they calling

What is the time of the call

What is the duration of the call

What are the locations of the parties

A map of China is seen through a magnifying glass on a computer screen showing binary digits. Edgar Su/Reuters

Virtually everything happening within a government can be discerned. Even without the location data point it is still possible, but the math formulas are significantly more complex. The analysis software is looking for two things: anomalies and tells. Tells, as in poker, are fixed indications of specific actions or events.

Let's look at an extremely simple real-world example. Let's assume, for the moment, that the Chinese can ascertain the five data points outlined above for every US government employee, including all of our top-secret-cleared personnel (yes, they took those records too). This would include all of our embedded agents in foreign nations.

The software would identify the following situation as a tell:

An embedded US agent in Russia contacts his local head of operations. The head of operations immediately contacts his superior. This immediate response up the chain of command finally reaches CIA headquarters in Washington. The tell here is that something of great importance was discovered.

Now for the anomaly: Instead of the normal communications from the CIA to other other covert agencies, and possibly to the White House, a flurry of communications begin among the Pentagon, the White House, congressional members, and military bases in proximity to Russia.

By combining the tell with the anomaly, China might assume, with a high degree of accuracy, that military conflict between the US and Russia is imminent. It could then immediately inflate the prices of all military gear that it provides to both countries and make whatever other gains it could by prior knowledge of the event.

China would not have to listen to a single conversation or intercept a single message. The entire process could be computed on a computer no more powerful than an iMac.

An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

But how would China get these data points? For any one of the thousands of companies manufacturing spyware, the question would be ludicrous. But I am assuming that you, my reader, are unfamiliar with the real world of mobile devices: Spyware can be implanted on any mobile device by opening an email, visiting a website, downloading a favorite game app or flashlight app, or by being too close to a Stingray device, which can plant Spyware on any mobile device within a half-mile radius. China has gone a step further, and by virtually owning most of the firmware used on nearly every router in America, can plant spyware on any device that connects to the internet.

If you think you can avoid spyware, then please, give up now. Over 80% of you have spyware on your mobile devices.

I have been in cybersecurity for nearly half a century, and with all of my knowledge and guile, I cannot stop spyware from being planted on my smartphone and mobile devices within hours of purchasing a new device.

Admittedly, the FBI, the DEA, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, and God knows who else have planted spyware, sometimes conflicting on every mobile device that I own. I cannot blame them. I am, after all, vaguely suspected of running a large meth lab in Central America. (In all seriousness — what would be the survival probability of a Gringo operating a meth lab in Central America?) I was on the run from a corrupt regime in Belize under the cloud off association with a murdered neighbor. (See my video explanation of all this.)

I was jailed in Guatemala for unnamed crimes and fought extradition back to Belize. I was deported back to America. And I have a sinister-looking goatee. So of course, a specially assigned Stingray follows me wherever I go. There is no escape from such a device. Which is why I use dumb phones, fitted with special hardware, for all my real communications, and smartphones for all of my disinformation.

But back to the Chinese. It is clear that by now, all employees of the US government has had spyware planted on every communication device in their possession. It won't be a large piece of software, and since it is transmitting only the tiny data points outlined above, it will be entirely undetectable amid the mass of data transmitted by the average mobile device.

Our tells and anomalous communications have probably already told the Chinese who will win the election, whether or not Captain Flint will meet his demise in season three of "Black Sails," and whether I will be audited by the IRS or otherwise punished by our government for speaking my mind.

But this much is certain: If we do not adopt a new paradigm of cybersecurity, we will all be soon speaking Mandarin.