14 DAY TRIAL // Two and a half weeks ago, John McAfee, founder of the McAfee antivirus company, made statements that he would decrypt the infamous San Bernardino shooter's iPhone or he would eat his shoe on the Neil Cavuto show.
Mr. McAfee, who is also a candidate in the 2016 presidential election representing the newly formed Cyber Party, claimed that he and his team would be able to break the iPhone's encryption in less than three weeks.
In a phone interview with a Daily Dot reporter, Mr. McAfee has now acknowledged that those statements were false, adding that he said what he said only for the purpose of getting the public's attention.
"By doing so, I knew that I would get a [expletive] of public attention, which I did. My point is to bring to the American public the problem that the FBI is trying to [fool] the American public," McAfee explains.
"How am I going to do that, by just going off and saying it? No one is going to listen to that [expletive]. So I come up with something sensational," he admits.
Mr. McAfee might have gone overboard with his original claim
His problem, as he has explained in a related YouTube video, was the fact that the FBI was trying to piggyback on the encrypted iPhone issue for the purpose of obtaining a universal key to Apple's encryption, a problem that many other people shared.
In the same video, McAfee has also presented a simple method of how he or the FBI could crack the iPhone.
Now, McAfee has admitted that he oversimplified his statements by ignoring all the risks his method exposes the iPhone and the data to, which the FBI knew in the first place and was trying to avoid by contacting Apple.
McAfee is practically saying that the method he intended to use was not entirely free from danger, and just like the FBI, he would have needed Apple's help to decrypt the iPhone in a safe manner. This means his solution and his original boast could have destroyed the device and the data, as easily as it could have cracked its encryption, making the entire endeavor a gamble instead of a sure thing, as he initially portrayed it.
