Two guys who should have a security debate

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://thehill.com/business--lobby/twelve-years-after-football-ellison-still
-tackling-defense-2005-02-15.html
 
Twelve years after football, Ellison still tackling defense     
 
More than a decade after claiming his third Super Bowl ring, former San
Francisco 49er Riki Ellison is still making a career in defense.

Ellison has emerged as a seemingly unlikely advocate for high-tech missile
defense systems, a politically charged issue devoured by aerospace engineers
and foreign-policy wonks the world over. It's not something most former
athletes get caught up in.
 
But missile defense is not merely a post-football hobby for the retired
linebacker. He has been at it for more than 20 years, studying national
security at the University of Southern California and using the football
off-season to work as a missile defense policy consultant for Lockheed
Martin.

Today, Ellison, 44, is the president of the National Missile Defense
Advocacy Alliance, an organization he founded out of his Crystal City, Va.,
apartment in 2002. Over the past three years, he has expanded the
organization to 4,200 members and receives nearly $500,000 a year in private
donations.
 
  _____  

 
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/10/23/going_postol/

Going Postol


The office is cluttered even by the standards of office clutter at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which fall somewhere between a
toddler's playpen and post-Agamemnon Troy. Balding and bearded and dressed
in shorts and a knit shirt, Theodore Postol sits behind a desk piled high
with stacks of memos, government reports, and thick binders. Somewhere
within these mountains of paper hides the quarry he's been pursuing for more
than 20 years.

"The real world," says Postol, a professor of science, technology, and
national security policy, "is often choosing between evils."

For 15 years now, Postol has been the leading scientific critic of missile
defense, which endeavors to shoot an enemy's long-range missiles out of the
sky. It is Postol's opinion that the idea did not work when Ronald Reagan
proposed it in 1983, does not work now, and will not work in the conceivable
future, and he neither minces words nor suffers fools gladly. In the latter
category, he has come to include not only the advocates of missile defense
but also the highest administrators at MIT, who Postol says have conspired
to cover up "fraud" in the testing of missile defense in order to maintain a
lucrative relationship with the country's defense establishment.

 

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