McAfee promises $100 Decentral dongle will enable NSA-proof chats

McAfee promises $100 Decentral dongle will enable NSA-proof chats

John McAfee is working on a $100 device called Decentral that will allow you to chat with your contacts in complete secrecy. Plug it in, and you’re joined up to a sort of living, breathing mobile network that can’t be infiltrated by government cyberops.


Who better to bring a device like this to market than McAfee? After all, he’s got the criminal past (he’s a self-confessed former drug dealer) and requisite paranoia (have a look a his insane Belize saga) to truly understand why something like Decentral should exist. It doesn’t hurt that he also headed up a massive security software company for several years.

Will Decentral be a hit? McAfee certainly thinks so. “I cannot imagine one college student in the world who will not stand in line to get one,” he told a conference center crowd in San Jose. And suppose the US government bans its sale? What then?
McAfee says he’ll make sure it winds up on store shelves in “England, Japan, [and] the Third World.” Decentral won’t be stopped, he said.
Still, you’ve got to wonder if McAfee can really deliver what he’s promising. Can Decentral really lock out the the same people that have reportedly hacked pretty much every super power in the world, created backdoors into industry-standard encryption standards, and entrapped “anonymous” TOR users?

Decentral will also have to offer something very compelling and unique to convince users to part with $100. Existing apps like Tor chat and the recently-announced BitTorrent Chat — which will also be completely decentralized and encrypted, like Decentral.
Then again, celebrity endorsements often help sell a product. With McAfee — the guy who gifted Trojanized laptops to Belizean officials and jammed a tampon up his nose to alter his physical appearance and avoid capture — as the face of Decentral, there’s a chance it could be a smash hit with privacy-minded technophiles