Grady Ward

Who is Grady Ward?

William Grady Ward is an American software engineer, lexicographer, and Internet activist who has featured prominently in the Scientology versus the Internet controversy.

Prior to his opposition to the Church of Scientology, Grady Ward compiled the Moby Project, an extensive compilation of English language lexical resources and in 1996 released it to the public domain. One of its components, Moby Thesaurus, has more than 2.5 million synonyms and related words, making it the largest thesaurus in the English language as of early 2006. Previously, Ward was known for compiling and distributing a public domain version of the complete works of William Shakespeare, Moby Shakespeare, which has been credited as being the most widely distributed works of Shakespeare in the world.

In 1993 his publisher, the Austin Code Works was investigated as to the export of strong cryptography. The US government at the time treated cryptographic software above a certain strength as the legal equivalent of munitions and restricted them accordingly. Ward spent time developing source code fragments collectively called Moby Crypto to encourage the pervasive development of programs containing state-of-the-art cryptography. Ward also promoted the idea of creating secure, memorable pass-phrases through "shocking nonsense." On 30 March 1995 he aided in the distribution of an NSA employee handbook when it was leaked by the on-line magazine Phrack arguing that if the government could not keep safe its own materials, then why would anyone trust them to maintain a secure key escrow scheme the NSA had proposed?