A whistle-blower to some, 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, 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 website -- say the purloined documents, some of which turned up on the Oakland Tribune website, 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 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.
