[IP] Re: demed export -- Security clearances, lie detectors, etc.

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Steve Goldstein [steve.goldstein@cox.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 1:17 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] demed export --    Security clearances, lie detectors, etc.

When I was a Program Director (grant program manager, really; the actual title sounds overly lofty for the job) at NSF in the 1990's, I asked a few of our "star" awardees about using our grant money for research assistantships for non-U.S. citizens or undergraduate stipends to non-U.S. citizens.  The common answer was that, at least at the graduate level, there were few, if any, worthy U.S. citizens to chose for their research teams.  One of my awardees had a prevalence of mainland Chinese on his teams, and, AT THAT  TIME, said that most of them tried to find ways to stay in the U.S. once they had earned their Ph.D.'s.  I'd bet that this would no longer be the case.

At any rate, the  bigger issue seems to be that too many U.S.-borns seek the lucrative careers in business or law, and not the rigorous roads to science and engineering.  For those of you in academia, what is the composition of your graduate pool as regards citizenship?

--SteveG


At 11:10 AM -0700 5/3/08,  Eugene H. Spafford wrote:
>Many countries have historically had some problems of the sort where
>nationals of country A who  come to the US to study sensitive topics.
>Thereafter, they returned to country A with knowledge of technology
>that provides country A with a military or economic advantage that
>they might not have been able to develop on their own.  We can't
>prosecute them for espionage, because the material they learned was
>not classified -- merely advanced, with strong dual uses.   We can't
>charge them with theft of trade secrets (even if they were) because
>country A won't extradite them on those charges.


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