Biography
Maximilian J. "Max" Obuszewski (born around 1944-1945) is a Baltimore-based peace activist arrested roughly seventy times — by his own estimate as of 2007 — across four decades of anti-war, anti-nuclear, draft-resistance, anti-death-penalty, Palestinian-solidarity and immigrant-rights actions. A former engineer and Peace Corps volunteer, he turned to organizing after the Kent State killings and moved to Baltimore in 1983 to work for Nuclear Free America, later joining the American Friends Service Committee, Maryland Peace Action and the Baltimore Nonviolence Center. He took part in five Plowshares-related disarmament actions, four of them alongside Philip Berrigan. Most of his arrests ended in citations, dismissals, probation or suspended sentences; his clearest jail terms were 30 days in 1995 and 10 days in 1999, both for actions at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In 2005-2006 an undercover Maryland State Police officer infiltrated his groups and logged him in a regional intelligence database under classifications including "Terrorism-Anti-War Protestors," making him a prominent example of post-September 11 surveillance treating nonviolent dissent as terrorism.
