[1] Its creation was the product of a meeting held on October 16–17, 1971; its leaders, Howard B. Godfrey and Jerry Lynn Davis, had been members of the Minutemen, a right-wing extremist organization.

[3] On June 26, 1975, the American Civil Liberty Union of Southern California filed a report with Senate investigators alleging that the FBI was instrumental in the creation and operation of the SAO.

The filing of this report came two days after the FBI publicly acknowledged its involvement in the illegal domestic counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, with activity spanning from May 1968 until April 1971.

[4] According to the ACLU report, Lincoln Bueno, a member of the left-wing Chicano organization Brown Berets, and Bohmer were to be lured over the border to a remote location in Tijuana, Mexico, where they would be murdered by Mexican Federal police over a contrived cache of smuggled firearms.

Segretti was quoted by the ACLU as having told the SAO that anyone causing trouble at the 1972 Republican convention would be "gotten rid of," apparently in reference to the so-called "Liddy plan" as described in the United States Senate Watergate Committee.