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

On Friday, the Department of Justice, yet again, assumed either that we, the American citizens, are idiots, or that we will, through fear, cave in to its arguments that to have security we must give up some personal privacy.

I, for one, being unafraid, am fed up with being assumed to be an idiot.

I thought I had ended the FBI/Apple issue when I debated Steve Rogers, the FBI mouthpiece, on CNN for 15 minutes last month. Steve began by declaring that to gain security we would have to give up privacy.

Knowing that privacy is a necessary prerequisite to liberty, I marveled at how a high-level FBI mouthpiece could have missed reading Benjamin Franklin's magnum opus of witticisms: "Those who would trade privacy or liberty for security, are deserving of neither."

I grabbed hold of Rogers' ankle and chomped down until at the end he conceded that maybe we could work together.

The FBI dropped its request that Apple unlock the iPhone used by one of the attackers in last year's San Bernardino, California, mass shooting after I disclosed that the FBI had a contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli mobile device forensics company, signed in 2013, to purchase devices designed to unlock any iPhone. And yes, the FBI was fully aware that it had these devices before the legal challenge to Apple.

I assumed, after the DOJ dropped its court challenge, that it would be the end of it and I could get back to the task of campaigning for president and, hopefully, doing a little fishing.

But Friday in a letter, the DOJ said it still wanted Apple's help to access data on an iPhone used by Jun Feng, a meth dealer in New York.

On hearing this I immediately assumed I was having an LSD flashback and took a substantial quantity of benzodiazepines to bring myself down. After sufficient time was allowed, I checked back into reality and discovered that in fact this hardly believable action on behalf of the FBI was real.

Nothing has changed. Does the FBI think, because I am 70, I am tired and will not go through this nightmare again? Is it planning to arrest me on bogus charges so I have no access to the media? Has it contracted a hit on me and planned on my not being around to fight?

Don't discount this last question. I was living in Belize when 42 armed soldiers stormed my property. They were paramilitary thugs trained by the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, and supplied with AR-15s given to them by the US government.

They shot my dog in front of my eyes with one of the AR-15s to prove they were serious. They destroyed a half-million dollars' worth of my property. They tortured me. All because I had refused to be extorted by the corrupt government of Belize.

I know full well, more than most of you, what the FBI is capable of.

I am alerting our government now: I will not ever give up. The freedoms and privacy that are taken away from me, through any inaction on my part, will likewise be taken away from the children and grandchildren of every one of you who are reading this article.

You do not have the right to take away privacy and freedom from your children.

But by not standing up with me, you are doing just that.

I will fight the authoritarianism that is growing within our government to my dying day (which, I believe, gets closer the more I speak out), alone if necessary.

But do I need to be alone up here? Not even Apple CEO Tim Cook has thanked me for my efforts. I am branded "eccentric," "a misogynist," "a fugitive."

But where might you be if I weren't up here risking everything?

Consider that for a moment. Where might you be?