The article says that these restrictions on research with a "foreign component" have been in place since at least 2003 but have only recently been clarified to include the researchers themselves.
It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.
Many graduate students, faculty and post-docs are foreign citizens. So banning them from conducting research could potentially shut down big research projects. It is not surprising to me that the NIH and other funding agencies didn't want to do this. (It is also unsurprising to me that the current administration would have few qualms about disrupting research: we know they don't care, ask the cancer studies that had to be saved with private Foundation funding last year.)
Before you start throwing disruptive rules at projects, you generally want to know that there is a critical security concern for that specific work. Most research just gets published a few months later, so foreign interests can just read it in a journal and download the dataset.
I don't have great sources on hand, this is just coming from a career situated in or adjacent to protecting research and IP from espionage. As the national labs and prime defense contractors got exceptional at defending their networks, this pushed state actors into attempting espionage at the university level.
It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy researching lift day-to-day work. You have way more tools in your HUMINT arsenal with this population. Sometimes research has natsec implications even though it is not in pre-class or classified status.
A famous example of this is how the US created it's stealth technology initially.
"The foundation for a science-based approach to the development of stealth aircraft was laid by Petr Ufimtsev, a Soviet physicist. In 1962, Sovietskoye Radio publishing house issued his book Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction that described the mathematical rationale for the development of stealth vehicles.
In the USSR, these ideas did not go any further, however, the Americans were very enthusiastic about them. Ufimtsev’s physical theory of diffraction has become, they say, the cornerstone of a breakthrough in the stealth technology. In the 1970s, the work was started in the USA on the basis of this knowledge as a result of which breakthrough stealth aircraft − Lockheed F-117 fighter and Northrop B-2 strategic bomber – have been produced."
Again, the output of most University research is published in journals and conferences, with raw data increasingly available as artifacts. Publication does not always give all the data! Some proprietary datasets and tools exist, but the implications here usually affect academic competitiveness, not national security.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some Universities do classified or sensitive research where the result is not broadly published. There are fully classified labs associated with Universities, and some that just have sensitive research. But in general these are special exceptions and should be approached on a case-by-case basis, rather than with some blanket law. The assumption for University research should be: assumed fully transparent, except where there is a specific reason it isn't.
I'm not disputing that, what I was (poorly) trying to communicate is that the pervasiveness of academic espionage chain is incredibly widespread. It relies heavily on the underfunded, international graduate students.
Many things are open research and intentionally funded as so, until a dual-use is found. My example was meant to show something that was intentionally funded and released openly, but only because USSR didn't know what they had and it's implications.
My personal confidence in this administration to do anything here in a meaningful way is non-existent. However, the very real problem of academic research funded by American dollars, in American labs, being passed to Geo-political adversaries before publish is pervasive and difficult to solve.
In a purely academic sense: i agree research should be fully transparent, except when a specific reason exists. The point is that sometimes we do not know it shouldn't be and that can be a real critical mistake. A way, and not the only way, to de-risk that is to enforce more strict criterion on the researcher(s) themselves.
Also: thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm a big fan of your work and personal blog.
Hi there – someone who's worked on NIH (NIMH) funded projects.
Our primary interest is in being transparent and reproducible. NIH has supported this for a long time – e.g. pushing people to post deidentified datasets online in central repositories. Since it's also good practice to provide your code in a reproducibility package, there is, literally, nothing to hide.
Recent MAHA-era large-scale funding opportunities have embraced this as "gold-standard science", and explicitly require separate reproducibility teams.
> It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.
Let us not be fooled by the obvious pretense, please.
Can anyone honestly say that the current administration is a paragon of careful scrutiny and rule-following? If you are wont to agree, then momentarily reflect if this question was ever posed in an earlier presidential administration in your lifetime.
International collaboration is the norm in science.
Telling researchers that they have to get permission before they can co-author a paper with a foreign colleague is insane, unless we're talking about a very small set of highly sensitive areas like nuclear engineering.
It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.