Grady Ward created the Moby Project, an extensive compilation of English language lexical resources, and in 1996 released it to the public domain.

[2] In 1993, his publisher, the Austin Code Works, was investigated for 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.

"[4] On 30 March 1995 he aided in the distribution of an NSA employee handbook when it was leaked by the on-line magazine Phrack[5] arguing that, if the government could not keep safe its own materials, then there was no reason for anyone to trust them to maintain a secure key escrow scheme the NSA had proposed.

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 12 May 1998.

[8][9] On February 16, 2012, Grady Ward published a novel, The Celestial Instructi0n, detailing a fictional attack on the United States information infrastructure.