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Scientific Research Encountering More Restrictions

Posted by michael on from the death-ray dept.

vab writes "MSNBC is running an article that details how the MIT AI Lab, the birth place of the free software movement, walked away from a $404K study because the government wanted to restrict participation by foreign students. The article talks about further restrictions the US Government is trying to impose in the name of homeland security and how other research institutions are reacting."

2 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Case in point: by slalderma · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was a grad student at Texas Tech until a few months ago and one of my prof.s had funding from US DOD to study dispersion of chem./bio. warfare agents. The project was multi-year and for 90% of the project, no foreign national was allowed to work on it. That was finally overturned, however, mainly because there weren't enough Americans to work on it.

    The project was new just before Sept. 11th and I'm not sure I can blame them for their restrictions at the time. I think they finally figured out that, at least in this case, it didn't matter who worked on the project. It wasn't going to propogate information about how to make delivery agents more effective, just how they interact with urban, rural, etc. environments.

    That and Lubbock isn't a hotbed for terrorists if you know what I mean. Cow-tippers, yes. Foreign spies, no.

  2. Re:Hey I'll take the money by NecroPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is no saying it was racist.

    Nationalist, sure, but that isn't the same thing.

    If the 'strings' had said "No French" or "No Germans", then this conversation wouldn't be happening.

    In this case, the NSA wanted to pre-screen any foreign nationals working on the project.

    I'm sorry, but I don't see the racism there. They didn't say that they (the foreign nationals) automatically couldn't work on the project, they just wanted to check out whichever ones did.

    Profiling? Maybe. But it happens regularly in government and business. The last two companies I worked for had a much more rigorous screening process for foreign nationals. In their defense, they'd gotten burned at least once.

    But then so has the US Government. I don't blame them for being careful.

    --
    I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.