Among the technologies to be outlawed are reverse engineering, with some exceptions, and penetration analysis. The exceptions allow reverse engineering for compatibility, encryption research, privacy protection, and to protect minors against pornography. There is no stated exception for computer security research and development. You'd think the banning of reverse engineering would be enough to get the industry in an uproar, but we hear little except a few minor complaints. Yet the entire software and hardware industry is built upon the acceptability of reverse engineering.
Algorithms are reverse-engineered so they can be studied and understood.
The goal is to improve upon them. It's designed to protect those in the recording and movie industries and nobody else. Apparently, the current copyright laws are not strong enough for these two industries, so they want a law targeted at guys who try and crack copy-protection schemes. To hell with the rest of the world if this bill screws up everyone else in other industries, such as the computer business. The only people in a large organization pushing this from the outside are the bonehead dupes at the American Association of Publishers , this despite the fact that the new bill does nothing new to protect the printed word.