VyanHello everyone, this is Michele Gregory, Stephen Heller's wife. Once again, Stephen and I thank you for all of your help and support. Your encouragement and kind words have been invaluable to us in this very difficult and frightening time.
As you know, Stephen has been charged with some very serious crimes for allegedly blowing the whistle on Diebold Election Systems. He has pleaded innocent to all charges. He needed the very best legal defense, but criminal defense attorneys are very expensive. So far, starting in August of 2004, we have covered Stephen's legal bills with our personal savings and by taking a second mortgage on our house. Our savings are now gone, and our credit is strained.
And so, with the help of some friends, I have started the Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund and corresponding website.
http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com
Please visit the site. It has details on Stephen's case, news, press articles, blog posts, and information about the defense fund, including detailed information on how it is run and how you can donate, should you wish to.
Whether or not you are able to donate, please pass the website around to everyone you know. Stephen's lawyer has said that public awareness of his situation will be beneficial to his defense.
Thank you all for all you have done, are doing, and will do. Stephen and I are in your debt; you have our gratitude.
With love,
Michele Gregory, proud and loving wife of Stephen Heller
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Should you wish to donate with a check, please make the check out to "The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund" and mail it to:
The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund
17216 Saticoy St., Box 234
Van Nuys, CA 91406-2103The fund itself is a non-interest bearing, FDIC insured checking account opened on March 7, 2006 at the First Federal Bank of California, Encino branch. Stephen's name is not on the account and he does not have access to the money. Monies can only be used for payments to Stephen's attorneys, and the account has been set up after advice from attorneys and with full transparency.
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YOU ARE URGED TO COPY THIS POST SEND IT TO YOUR LISTS, POST IT ON BLOGS, AND INFORM AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE
Stephen Heller was faced with the ethical dilemma from hell. What do you do when a presidential primary is just weeks away, and you are assigned a word processing assignment that has you looking at evidence that the secretary of state is being lied to by the voting machine company counting millions of votes? What do you do when those lies explode into thousands of disenfranchised voters? Nothing?
In times like these, the citizenry depends on honesty and courage like Stephen Heller has shown. If you want citizens of courage like Heller successfully threatened and ultimately silenced, do nothing. If you believe that he went to the front lines for YOUR rights, please give what you can.
Next
After giving to the Stephen Heller Defense Fund, please also join the important VoteTrustUSA.org initiative to fight for Ion Sancho. This involves simply clicking a link and sending an important letter to Florida officials.
Here is the Ion Sancho support link:
http://votetrustusa.org/...* * * * *
Stand together and fight, folks, or let them pick us off one by one.
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WHISTLING DIEBOLD
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media ServicesThey ain't gonna kiss you just because you're a whistleblower. No matter that you exposed wrongdoing and struck a blow for fair elections. The larger good isn't always obvious to the powers that be.
So Steve Heller, a Los Angeles-based actor whose day job is doing temporary office work, faces three felony charges, all of which are a stretch: felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office says he's a thief, an Internet criminal, and that's that. And, oh yeah, he violated attorney-client confidentiality, and cost a big law firm a million dollars in lost business.
Serious stuff. And if the DA's office has its way, this is all the judge and jury will look at: the law in its narrowest sense, as though ethical issues aren't sometimes murky and enormously complicated.
Indeed, this is the story of a 44-year-old man who had a problem in practical ethics fall into his lap a little over two years ago, when he was temping in the word-processing center of Jones Day, a major Los Angeles law firm. Among the firm's clients was Diebold Election Systems, the largest manufacturer of electronic voting machines and voting machine software in the U.S. - and probably the most controversial.
Diebold machines are notoriously hackable and unreliable, and the company itself is as secretive as it is politically connected. The company is in the forefront of the spread of unverifiable ("trust us") electronic voting across the country, a phenomenon that many computer experts and fair-election advocates find utterly terrifying.
"In connection with his duties on Jan. 29, 2004, suspect Heller was given an assignment to work on a Jones Day document regarding Diebold voting machines," Heller's arrest warrant attests. "After completing that assignment, suspect Heller, without authorization, accessed and printed 107 Jones Day documents concerning
their representation of Diebold."What the arrest warrant leaves out is that, in 2004, Diebold machines were going to be used in a number of California counties in the March primary and the November general elections, and the machines' questionable reliability was in the news a lot. And indeed, Diebold machines did malfunction in the March elections. But they didn't malfunction in November because by then they had been decertified by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley - thanks in large part to Heller's actions.
The documents Heller, the temp word processor, happened upon and subsequently printed out revealed a potential crime in progress. Here's where the ethics become urgent. He could either ignore what he saw or, at considerable personal risk and with nothing to gain except clarity of conscience, take action. He took action.
He gave the documents to election-reform advocates, who got them into the hands of the media and state officials. Because he did, data concerning Diebold's use of uncertified software, which was supposed to remain private, became public knowledge. "In one memo," the Los Angeles Weekly wrote, "the law firm warned Diebold, before the March primary, that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County, starting in 2002, violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract."
And election-reform advocate Peter Soby wrote on Huffington Post: "So in a nutshell, Diebold was defrauding the state government and taxpayers of California, and disenfranchising the voters of California. And the documents prove it."
More can be found at: http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com
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