Comment by rsfern

This list of high risk countries is not new (with the exception of maybe Venezuela being recently added, I’m not sure). Researchers with these citizenships have faced extra security review before joining NIST for years, and last year the lab increased the level of security review for everyone (not just this list)

I can understand a clearly communicated need for additional security requirements. But NIST operates almost totally in open science mode, with the main exceptions of being industry cooperative agreements. I don’t think this move to shed international researchers by reneging on commitments from the lab has been at all justified from a security standpoint.