I would wonder if there would be a couple of areas that would be applicable:
- The Intellectual Property: Reverse engineering may be completely legal, however in the US the DMCA may be applicable to the circulation of the reverse engineered work. This would be similar to the DSS encryption used on DVDs. It was reverse engineered, but is illegal to distribute in the US, as a result it is only downloadable from off-shore sites.
- Intercepting Encrypted Comms: I know that it is explicitly illegal in Canada, but not sure if it is explicitly identified as illegal in the US.
One of the leading organisations on these kinds of things is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (
Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending Freedom in the Digital World ). They have been doing a lot of lobbying.
There was also some legal cases recently regarding the practice of academic study of technology by use of reverse engineering, and then the distribution of the findings. I think Stanford or MIT were involved in those cases.
Victor
Edit: This may be applicable:
http://www.eff.org/issues/coders/rev...ngineering-faq