Deep in the heart of the Bible Belt, John McAfee, the tech millionaire, eccentric and one-time fugitive, appears to have finally settled down – in his way.

A few months shy of his 70th birthday, McAfee, as famous for his plentiful eccentricities as the anti-virus software he created, is living somewhat in the open again, this time in Lexington, Tennessee, a rustic and unassuming town with a population of less than 8,000.



Born in Scotland, raised in the US, McAfee had been living in Portland, Oregon – a city that seemed a more obvious choice for a yoga-loving, gun-toting technocrat who had just fled Belize via Guatemala amid a bizarre murder investigation. His woodsy property in the west Tennessee countryside, though, has ended up suiting him better. He’s happier here, even if he still spins ominous stories of hit men on his trail.



“One never knows what the future holds,” McAfee tells the Guardian, before admitting that he can’t see himself living anywhere else. “I have friends here in Lexington. This is a beautiful small town. Neighborly. But yes indeed – bad people are still after me.”

McAfee is still looking over his shoulder, even three years after he fled Belize when officials named him as a “person of interest” in the shooting death of his neighbor. McAfee, never formally charged, ducked out of the country and spent part of his time on the lam while granting media interviews, posting on his blog and sending emails, all of which lent a bizarre twist to the flight of someone who was ostensibly hiding from the law.

The computer security pioneer quickly introduced himself to the town’s mayor and sheriff upon arrival in Lexington. He uses multiple phones to throw off would-be trackers and says a neighbor recently told him about seeing a black car driven by a man with a scar on his face.

That same McAfee gives the appearance of a man determined to live a much lower-wattage existence these days.



He’s back to developing software, for example, much of it with a focus on privacy. No longer living on the run, he’s also mentoring startups and presenting himself as a security expert via appearances on news outlets like Fox News and through high-profile speeches. He gave one such presentation earlier this month in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference, warning attendees how porous and vulnerable smartphones have become, at times holding one aloft from the stage as he spoke.

“Security is no longer in the hands of the data center staff,” he said during the event. “People are watching you while you’re on the phone.”

Meanwhile, McAfee also runs a software development company, Future Tense Central, which shares space with a startup accelerator in Opelika, Alabama, about a six-hour drive from Lexington.

When he’s not there or on the road, he can be found in the small-town environs he now calls home, midway between Memphis and Nashville, in a state whose house of representatives recently voted to make the Bible its official book and where McAfee says he plans to spend the rest of his life.

It’s a striking change of scenery for the entrepreneur who found extraordinary success developing software to combat the first computer viruses that had begun zipping around the globe. After he started McAfee Associates out of his home in the 1980s, McAfee’s fame and fortune rose in tandem with his warnings – paranoia, some argued – about existential threats to the digital grid.

A fugitive who fled Belize after his neighbor was shot dead, John McAfee’s image has combined a combustible mix of drink, drugs, women and guns. Photograph: Internet

McAfee’s sometimes dystopian take on technology proved prescient given all we now know thanks to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But there’s also another side to him, one built on a combustible mix of drugs and drink, of harrowing moments like the time he put a loaded Smith & Wesson to his head in front of a Wired reporter and the image he presented of himself as the Hugh Hefner of hacking. A few years ago, he released a video posted to YouTube that explained how users can uninstall McAfee software featuring scantily clad women, guns, “bath salts” and its star in a smoking jacket and pyjamas.

More recently McAfee has emerged as a privacy advocate. He has claimed, for example, to have information about who was behind the Sony hack. “A lot of the things I’m working on now are focused on privacy and personal power,” McAfee said. “People should take their power back. We depend too much on governments and corporations for our personal lives.





“Think about this. There are 10m waterproof phones in circulation. You have teen girls frequently texting in the shower. App developers these days – most of them aren’t companies like IBM or places with audit controls and some measure of respectability. And they’re asking permission to turn on the device’s camera, to read SMS messages and on down the line. You’ve got to believe me – while we’re speaking, people are spying on teen girls. And I know it’s actually happening.”

The views on privacy and security that inform his work and the products his company is releasing generally skew a bit darker than mainstream attitudes toward consumer products. He thinks the Apple Watch is a “nightmare” from a privacy standpoint. He’s also skeptical about connected devices in the home, considering them less as useful technology than as one more entry point for a hacker to use to cause harm.

“Game apps are the worst,” McAfee said. “They’re developed by a few people, most of the time we don’t even know who they are, and they end up with 100 million users. And virtually all apps that are free ask for excessive permissions. Why? Because nothing in life is free. If they’re giving it to you for free, they’re collecting your information. The vast minority only use what they need. If you don’t need an app, don’t download it.”

Except, of course, his company’s, which he insists most people do need. The company’s website says it was founded by McAfee in 2013 and that its focus is mobile and web applications designed to help users take back control over their information and privacy.

John McAfee is transferred in an ambulance to the national police hospital in Guatemala City on 6 December 2012, after fleeing Belize. Photograph: Johan Ordonez/AFP

He says the company also has an encrypted email program that, at the time of this writing, it hadn’t released yet.

Beyond his company, McAfee has high praise for the Round House, the Opelika startup space that represents his base of operations and where he works with other fledgling startups.

“The objective is for everyone to work together here, and the teams have come up with some astonishing products,” he said. “One has a robotic hand which can be manufactured for $28 for people who’ve lost fingers.”

Privacy is the issue, though, that really animates him. He turns frequently to a now-famous statement by Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, to help make his case. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt told the financial news channel CNBC in 2009 when asked if people should really treat Google as a “trusted friend”.

“Most people don’t understand privacy,” McAfee says. “Google would have you believe if you have nothing to hide, why should you care if people know everything. But stop and imagine a world in which everyone knows your every thought and every action. It would be chaos.

“When you first meet someone, you don’t divulge your deepest secrets. If privacy doesn’t matter, would you be willing to give your wallet to a total stranger and let them go through it and write down everything they find inside? Then why on earth would we believe that if we’re not doing anything wrong, we shouldn’t care if someone has our information?”

McAfee’s own relationship to privacy is complicated. He says repeatedly he’s not in hiding today, even if he has chosen to live far from the madding crowd. But even if he wanted to keep a low profile today, it wouldn’t work for long.

His life is being turned into a movie by Montreal-based production company Impact Future Media. Its working title is Running in the Background.

Company founder and producer Francois Garcia tells the Guardian some announcements related to the film will be made “in the near future”, but due to contractual obligations, no details about attached names, distribution partners or dates can be disclosed yet.

For now, the real version of McAfee’s story, the one unfolding in the US heartland, will have to suffice.

