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Politics : Election Fraud Reports -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (639)	3/23/2006 4:10:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1729

Diebold Whistleblower takes 500 incriminating documents: contracostatimes.com Voting machine whistle-blower faces theft charges By Hemmy So LOS ANGELES TIMES LOS ANGELES - A whistle-blower to some people, a thief to others, Stephen Heller says he's a regular guy, not an activist or a member of any political group. But charged last month in Los Angeles with three felonies for allegedly stealing damaging documents about voting-machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems, Heller has become a hero to digital-rights and political activists who say he helped expose a threat to the election system. "My wife would never describe me as someone on the front lines of anything, and I wouldn't either," Heller said in a recent interview. "I'm not politically active, except I've voted since I was 18." Prosecutors say Heller, a 43-year-old actor and resident of Van Nuys, a neighborhood northwest of downtown, took more than 500 pages of Diebold-related documents, including memos from the company's attorneys at the Jones Day law firm. The memos suggested that the company might have broken state law by providing Alameda County with voting machines that had not been certified by the state. "This case is not about whistle-blowing. It's about theft of attorney-client privileged material from an attorney's office," Los Angeles County district attorney spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said. But activists and bloggers -- including the California Voter Foundation; Black Box Voting, an electronic voting group; and the liberal www.huffingtonpost.com Web site -- say the purloined documents, some of which turned up on the Oakland Tribune's Web site, helped spur a state crackdown on Diebold. "People should be thanking Stephen Heller because ultimately he helped our secretary of state stop illegal acts by Diebold," said Cindy Coen, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group based in San Francisco. Heller has pleaded not guilty to three counts of felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. Although state law protects whistle-blowers from retaliation by employers, it does not preclude criminal prosecution. On the advice of his lawyer, Heller declined to discuss the facts of his case, but he agreed to talk more generally. Brought up in a small dairy-farming town in upstate New York, Heller moved to Los Angeles in 1997 after years of waiting tables and performing in small theaters in Chicago. Heller said he had stopped just short of finishing a theater degree at DePaul University to dedicate himself to an acting career. In Los Angeles, he managed to land a few small roles on television shows and in commercials. But acting failed to pay the bills, so he brushed up on his typing skills and found work as a word processor. He lives in a one-story home with his wife, an actress and writer who also works as a word processor. Heller began a three-month stint as a temporary worker at the Los Angeles office of Jones Day in December 2003. One of his assignments was transcribing an attorney's tapes on legal issues facing a major client: Diebold. The name was familiar thanks to media attention surrounding the company and its new touch-screen voting systems. Heller, a news junkie, said he had had no prior dealings with the company. Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, told investigators that Heller met her in a park in Ventura County in early 2004 and slipped her the documents, which she turned over to the secretary of state and Oakland Tribune. "What Stephen did was the best of citizenry," Harris said. Harris and fellow activist Jim March, later joined by the state attorney general, had sued Diebold in 2003 for allegedly failing to certify the voting system.