I thought that was a known fact. I often hear about people who can't attend security-related conferences because of visa problems. Last year at the CRYPTO/CHES/FDTC/PROOFS week in Santa Barbara at least three researchers (from India IIRC) couldn't make it because of visa problems, while they had accepted papers at one of the conference!
In many lab outside of the US, we are told not to be to verbose about the type of conferences we are going to attend in the US. Words such as "security", "cryptography", "side-channel attacks", "fault injection attacks", etc. must be banned from the application. Instead we just say that we are going to a "computer science conference" or "information processing conference" for instance.
From the visa guidelines of the embassy where I applied for my visa [1]:
The visa applications of applicants involved in technical or scientific fields may require additional administrative processing. Therefore, applicants who believe they may be affected by this requirement should apply as early as possible.
Right, scientific and technical people will get extra scrutiny. Under the US's threat model -- moral or not -- it is not the janitors and artists you worry about, it's the people visiting our nuclear, biological, and high-technology facilities.
The fact that this has very bad side effects on technological progress is important, but it's not like the government gives smart people scrutiny because it hates smart people. This behavior is brutally rational if you just look at their primary mission.
Happens all the time. A colleague of mine has issues because she happened to have worked in a lab previously whose building also happened to house a lab that did nuclear research (even though she never did any herself). Scientists also move around a lot, so it doesn't help if you've worked in/visited/just been to a conference in certain countries that might arouse suspicion... It's a bit of a nightmare actually.
Scientists specifically are targeted for extra scrutiny. In my visa interview I was asked if my research is in cryptography and waved through when I said it isn't.
Not much to elaborate. You're told to bring a stack of documents if you have a scientific or technical background, such as CV, a list of publications, an invitation letter from your US host, a letter from your university etc. If the embassy official isn't satisfied, you are asked to send more documents to a state.gov email address. On one occasion they wanted more information about my work as a programmer before I started my PhD. When they asked me for more documents I was tempted to joke that it doesn't matter what address I use, the email will reach the required destination anyway.
My friend was in the US before he had to go out and get his H1B extended. He was stuck outside the country for about 5 months for "additional scrutiny". He got his undergrad, masters and Ph.D. in the US and worked in the area of chemical engineering + spent working 6 months in middle east on water filtration projects.
Didn't that make the headlines some months ago ? I remember something about a teacher writing on behalf of his student. "We give people top education and then prevent them from working in the US and this harms us".
when I was a grad student, we regularly removed foreign students from our lab web site when they were renewing their visas due to the belief that visas were approved more quickly the less the government could learn by googling your name. That is, if they can quickly learn anything about your research, those are all potential red flags. If a quick google search turns up nothing, you'll just be rubber stamped through.
One of the grad students I know was told he was not allowed to renew his student visa unless he stopped working on computer security. He had to switch advisers and the school had to swear that he would not be allowed to continue his previous work.
I know of another Israeli security researcher that had big trojble getting an american visa for travel, he had to cancel his trip because getting the visa took 5 months IIRC.
"It is clear that scientists have been singled out, since I hear that other ‘simple citizen’, do get their visa in a short time."
Scientists get more scrutiny? What in the world is going on there?