At 01:46 PM 01/14/2002 -0500, Trei, Peter wrote:

[interesting material about this being originally written to harass the German-American Bund.

Point two: The cypherpunks mailing list is not an organization. There is no membership list, there are no officers. There are no dues, no organizational hierarchy. There is no agreed set of aims, purposes, or activities. There is no property, and no post office address.

Anybody who's come to the Bay Area Cypherpunks Meetings, which DDT and I send out announcements for, can also validate that "organization" is a rather strong term for them :-)

The above is relevant when you consider the next section of the code, the reporting requirements:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cacodes/corp/35100-35105.html

Note that these all have to be sent in, 'subscribed under oath' by all the officers. Who, exactly, would that be?

We don't have any officers - so the report becomes the null set. And some of us belong to religions that forbid making oaths, while the oaths you'd get from other non-officers are more like "<expletive deleted!> I'm not filling out this form"

I'll leave the constitutionality of the law to others, but think its highly suspect.

However, for entertainment, somebody might want to check with the California Secretary of State to look at the registry of subversive organizations, which the last section of the law says is public record and open to inspection.