John McAfee in a file photo from 2012 (Associated Press)

John McAfee wants to run for president on the Libertarian ticket. He may or may not make that happen. But either way, he has some rather non-Libertarian ideas about cybersecurity. Namely, that all terrorist plots can be detected with the right technology.




From CNN:

“I wouldn’t care if the entire country of Syria came here, if we had the cybersecurity system in place,” McAfee said. McAfee said his preferred system would detect terrorist plots before they can go into effect. “If we had a coherent cybersecurity policy, we would’ve known about this the moment it was hatched,” McAfee said, advocating for what he called the Chinese approach to national security. “It would be impossible to hatch a plan against the Chinese,” McAfee said.

McAfee insists that all of this monitoring would be occurring outside the United States. When pressed about how he’d detect homegrown, domestic terrorism he says it’s “hard to explain.”


So, yeah, either McAfee either wants to make our surveillance state even more robust, or he thinks Minority Report was a documentary. Either way, he’s not going to kiss your baby. Good luck, John.