Palfrey's life

I've been worried for a bit that my research might end up becoming classified by someone at some point. (un)luckily, we're not getting anywhere near good enough results that anyone over here has even considered it. Open-source licenses for everything and all that, has been very nice. I was concerned when I went to the US last year, but as all that I got was ending up on some damn "frisk him every f*cking time" list for airports, which is pretty good compared to what my paranoid mind was imagining.

But, now we have this story turning up in the NYT. For those not in the field (i.e. everyone else) note that the person and program they're getting quotes from is Deborah Estrin and the Network Embedded Sensor Technology - i.e. one of the major people in my area (who I got to meet last year), and that Darpa wanted to classify some of her earlier work on my damn area. Yeah, all that stuff under open-source licenses, very much free-as-in-speech (BSD, "do what the heck you like" licenses), they wanted to classify, and not let any non-US citizens on the projects. Admittedly, this did end up with them deciding not to have any Darpa money for the first time in 15 years, but as a non-US citizen working on said systems, and (hopefully) intending to visit the US to give presentations on it, my personal internal paranoia meter has just jumped a few points.

This will probably all blow over at some point, and there'll probably never be any good reason for me to get worried about black-clad secret police bundling me off into a van the moment I step into US territory, *but* the idea of part of my not-very-large field getting classified, and ergo off-limits for my being able to learn from, is not good.