He’s a Russian spy come over to our side. Victor Sheymov is a former high-level KGB operative who fled to the United States. Now he’s telling us cyber secrets – sort of like Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n
His latest book, edited by Kahaluu literary agent Roger Jellinek, is Tiebreaker: Tower Of Secrets II<\/I>. Sheymov deals with his experience with the CIA, Russian “mole” infiltration of our government and how the latest cyber-security technology overcomes our best defenses.<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n
Sheymov defected in 1980 and is now CEO of a company developing cyber security technologies to protect government and commercial databases, and programs to protect children from Internet predators.<\/p>\n
Sheymov says, “There is no need for massive monitoring or sophisticated content analysis of private communications.”<\/p>\n
Should we believe him? He defected with CIA help, but so did the infamous Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky – now thought to have been a plant all along.<\/p>\n
Sheymov is an unhappy man. He says after the NSA and CIA used him, they badly treated him and his family. National media mostly have shied away from his tell-all writings. Also, I wonder if he was aware of the other Tiebreaker <\/I>book by Jack Bickham about “retired tennis pro and part-time spy Brad Smith who tries to help a young Russian tennis star defect, but the defection goes horribly wrong and they must run for their lives.”<\/p>\n
I always find some pearls among castaway oyster shells. So here’s what’s worth considering in Sheymov’s writing:<\/p>\n
He documents that static defensive measures we use in cyberspace to keep our secrets and our credit cards safe are futile. (This is frightening: Listeners with parabolic microphones can intercept even encrypted emails and passwords by recording the hums your computer capacitors and coils make as you enter data!)<\/p>\n
He makes a case for a CIA catastrophic intelligence failure that we hardly know about with the arrest of its agent Aldrich Ames as a Russian spy in 1994.<\/p>\n
He tells the uncensored story of how his FBI liaison man Robert Hanssen had been spying for the old USSR.<\/p>\n
He says we can’t stop cyber-spying. The technology is running way ahead of the ability to detect it. That breach of Target stores’ data may have compromised 120,000 Hawaii customers. Neiman Marcus also has been infiltrated.<\/p>\n
Sheymov complains that once the CIA had drained him of knowledge it cut him adrift. Well, if he as a veteran spy didn’t anticipate that, he is pretty naive. Any John Le Carr\u00e9 reader knows a spy is expendable.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, you conspiracy junkies who enjoyed Sheymov’s first Tower of Secrets <\/I>certainly will find red meat in this new one.<\/p>\n
And those of you who hope our Supreme Court will put a leash on the NSA will find a cohort in this cyberspace expert, who says: “The monitoring of somebody else’s private communications is invasive and represents a form of surveillance. It is no different from monitoring somebody’s (snail) mail.”<\/p>\n
BanyanTreeHouse@gmail.com<\/B><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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