It doesn't demand you surrender your rights yet. It is just becoming more and more encouraging that you do so and I know many young researchers who are opting to make that choice a lot more often than I used to see.
The governmental sector in our field is the main area I was thinking of. And it is one that is only growing with time. A lot of avenues and research sub-fields require clearances if you don't want to be on the outside looking in. In particular, our ability to get realistic threat information on large scale actors is vastly limited and my research suffers from that lack of context.
This is worse in some specific subfields than it is in others, crypto comes to mind. Though that is one area where academia seems to have actually maybe made that less true than it used to be.
There are people in bio and other areas who are experiencing similar pressures. The scope of the work done by people with clearances is trending upwards and the subfields in which someone's ability to participate in them is more limited without a clearance seems to be expanding.
You should encourage your peers not to go work for the government. There's a misconception on HN (I don't think you hold it) that GSA work is a major feeder for infosec, for vulnerability research, and for defensive security work. It isn't. Most of the researchers anyone here has "heard of" don't do any work for the government at all.
I talk every once in awhile about how Matasano chooses not to do government work, which makes it sound like we're taking a difficult principled stand. In reality, it's a very easy principled stand; our calendar is uniformly packed, we have no sales team, and I don't even remember the last time we needed to think about the the USG.
I personally have no problem with offensive security people working for the USG. It's not a choice I would make, but I see how other people might decide differently. But if you decide to do that, to make your work part of the national defense, it makes sense to me that you're going to lose some control over that work and over some of what you learn as you do that work.
Let's be honest: people doing "cyber" work for the government aren't poor kids from the suburbs trying to pay for college by doing a tour of duty. Relative to the market as a whole, they're immensely well compensated.
Its funny that you say "people doing "cyber" work for the government aren't poor kids from the suburbs trying to pay for college by doing a tour of duty." This is essentially what the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service is sans combat. The program has been going on for a long time now, Mudge played a part in the creation of the program.
The governmental sector in our field is the main area I was thinking of. And it is one that is only growing with time. A lot of avenues and research sub-fields require clearances if you don't want to be on the outside looking in. In particular, our ability to get realistic threat information on large scale actors is vastly limited and my research suffers from that lack of context.
This is worse in some specific subfields than it is in others, crypto comes to mind. Though that is one area where academia seems to have actually maybe made that less true than it used to be.
There are people in bio and other areas who are experiencing similar pressures. The scope of the work done by people with clearances is trending upwards and the subfields in which someone's ability to participate in them is more limited without a clearance seems to be expanding.