Grady Ward

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Grady Ward has featured prominently in the Scientology versus the Internet controversy.

Prior to his opposition to Scientology practices, 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 2006.¹ 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.²

In 1993 his publisher, the Austin Code Works was investigated as to the export of strong cryptography.³ 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."⁴ On March 30, 1995 he aided in the distribution of an NSA employee handbook when it was leaked by the on-line magazine Phrack⁵ 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?⁶

In 1995, Ward learned of the attempt by the Church of Scientology to delete the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology. A self-described free speech fanatic, Ward was drawn to the ongoing online fight between the Church of Scientology and its critics, and joined the critics of Scientology practices that congregated in alt.religion.scientology. He quickly drew attention to himself by publicly requesting Scientology materials be sent to him, giving detailed instructions on how to do so anonymously, and by repeatedly insulting and deriding the leaders and lawyers of the Church of Scientology using highly charged and degrading language. Examples were his description of Helena Kobrin, lawyer for the Church of Scientology, as "the 'ho of babble-on" and his description of David Miscavige, ecclesiastical leader of the Church of Scientology, as "'Rear' Admiral Miscavige." Ward explained⁷ that his strategy was to use language as a weapon ("Semiotic Warfare", "Scamizdat") against an organization who not only claimed that its adherents were infested by the thousands of murdered space aliens⁸, but admitted in a May 22, 1997 deposition of Religious Technology Center's president Warren McShane that a private investigator long associated with Scientology obtained photographs of Ward's children from his elderly mother.

In 1996 the Church of Scientology sued Ward,⁹ alleging that he was responsible for anonymous postings of material to which the Church claimed copyright. After several years of litigation in which Ward defended pro per in forma pauperis and responded to more than 1000 docket items in the Northern District of California, San Jose, the lawsuit was eventually settled on May 12, 1998. Ward prevailed on the Church's trade secret claim resulting in a dismissal with prejudice, but agreed to a stipulated judgement on Scientology's copyright claim. Without a finding of liability by Ward, he agreed to pay Scientology $200 a month for life. Unusually for legal settlements with the Church of Scientology, the settlement was not secret, and contained no restrictions on what Ward could say about Scientology. The settlement itself became a source of ongoing legal dispute with two appeals to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but to date it has not been violated by either party.