ECCENTRIC millionaire John McAfee has admitted he lied about the method he said he would use to crack the iPhone at the centre of a huge privacy row between Apple and the FBI.

An open letter penned by McAfee a few weeks ago had all the characteristics of the notorious programmer as he made the extraordinary claim that he and his team of weed-smoking prodigies would hack the iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook in three weeks.

“I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone. This is a pure and simple fact,” he wrote. He went on to reiterate his bold deceleration in a number of media interviews.

But the man who founded one of the very first companies to provide antivirus software has backed away from his sensational claim that he would use the technique of social engineering to crack the phone, and said he lied to draw public attention to the case.

In a phone interview with the Daily Dot, he said he wanted to push back against the official narrative of the FBI. The investigative bureau claims they need Apple’s assistance to hack the phone.

“I knew that I would get a sh*tload of public attention, which I did,” he said. “The FBI is trying to fool the American public.”

He said the only way to highlight that the FBI was lying in order to set a legal precedent was to make the sensational claim.

“So I come up with something sensational,” he said. “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.”

Contrary to what McAfee says, the FBI wants Apple to write custom software to allow the authorities to bypass built-in security features in the phone’s software so they can use brute force technology to guess the pin code of the device.

During a congressional hearing this week, FBI Director James Comey said his office had requested help from the entire US government but they were unable to find a solution to accessing the phone’s data without the help of Apple’s programmers.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said writing software to allow the FBI to bypass security protocols would amount to creating a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks. There was no way to keep the technique secret once it was developed, he said.

But McAfee claims it’s all a song and dance.

Last week in an interview with Russia Today he claimed the FBI is either clueless or playing dumb to perhaps carry out more sinister plans.

“It it a half-hour job, the FBI knows this, Apple knows this,” he said. “The FBI knows this and if it does not we are in deep trouble. Deep trouble because it should know this.”

During the TV interview he explained how a hardware and software engineer could go about retrieving the data on the phone.

As Ars Technicha pointed out, a similar technique to the one described by McAfee could potentially prove successful, but would be immensely risky.

By manually inspecting the handset’s processor using acid and lasers, hackers could figure out the device’s unique hardware ID and try to combine it with the each of the PIN numbers to try and find the right one. In addition to being incredibly complex and expensive, if such a technique was done incorrectly the data on the phone could be permanently destroyed.

For McAfee, how the iPhone is hacked is beyond the point. He said it was absurd to focus on the simplicity of his explanation as to how he would crack the phone and not the broader point of the FBI’s alleged deception.

“Is seemed absurd to me 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 FBI is trying to do to us,” he said.