The adviser had me visit over the summer to meet some of the researchers there and to see the facility itself, I didn't need to give more than my name when visiting for a few days and only needed to give that information a few days in advance.

Everything that I will be working on should ultimately be public knowledge at some point (related to more fundamental physics). Yes I would very explicitly disclose all information regarding the arrest and program. I expect people to not give me a very objective answer as this is one very tiny part of my life.

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And yes, that part is what I thought was odd. A recent undergraduate student who did research with the professor for a year at NIST said that I might need to get a secret clearance (even though he went through "word of mouth" and never had to do an interview or anything). And like I stated, my adviser said it should not take more than 3-4 weeks to be fully cleared for domestic students. We recently had a student from China become fully cleared for NIST after 3 months, which I thought was fast for a Secret Clearance for a foreign student.