Short commentary on the fact that in the end, John McAfee was not caught through superior sleuthing by the Guatemalan Police but by a hacker who took him down thanks to metadata.

So the rest of you don’t have to read the details, what happened was that McAfee, yes, that McAfee of antivirus software fame, fled his home in Belize after his next door neighbor had been found murdered. He fled Belize and had been hiding out, blogging and tweeting along the way which I am sure the authorities found quite amusing. In the end, he was caught because he gave an interview to a reporter who took a picture of him with his iPhone. The picture was posted on the Internet and some hacker got a hold of the photo file which had the GPS coordinates of the location of the phone embedded in it.

If this had been an NCIS episode, they would have analyzed the background of the photo to figure out the exact location. But in real life,  a smart person took the simplest path to the solution which was a straight line right through the metadata embedded in the digital image. In the end, the hacker posted the information on the Internet and the Guatemalan Police apprehended McAfee and arrested him for illegally entering the country.

So I guess you could say that he was captured by metadata, but I think he was more trapped by his own hubris.