So in North Dakota, you can apparently be prosecuted for conducting a DNS zone transfer:

“Ritz’s behavior in conducting a zone transfer was unauthorized within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crime Law.”

Interpreting that, it seems to say that you should not do a zone transfer without the expressed permission of the transferee (??) – whoever that may be. Many nameservers don’t restrict who can carry out a zone transfer, for legitimate reasons, but there’s no mechanism for explicitly getting the permission of someone in authority before doing so. Any such system would be unworkable.

But wait, there’s more, publishing the results of freely available whois data is also illegal:

“Ritz has engaged in a variety of activities without authorization on the Internet. Those activities include port scanning, hijacking computers, and the compilation and publication of Whois lookups without authorization from Network Solutions.”

The braindead statements above came from a court course filed by a spammer against the anti-spam activist David Ritz.