Lisa Grant

Lisa Grant is the Staff Writer for Technology, Data Capitalism & Surveillance at Just Right News, where she also leads coverage of what she calls “The Algorithmic State.” Born March 30, 1989 in Palo Alto, California, and now based in Seattle, Washington, she writes at the intersection of code, commerce, and power—translating technical systems into plain English and asking who benefits when machines make decisions about human lives. Writing under a pen name, Grant brings an insider’s eye to the promises and perils of the digital age. Growing up in Silicon Valley, she watched the shift from hobbyist tinkering to a data-driven marketplace that treats attention as a commodity and identity as inventory. Early professional stints inside the technology world left her fluent in how data pipelines actually work: the SDKs that quietly harvest behavioral signals, the risk-scoring engines that profile users, the content filters that sand down debate in the name of “safety,” and the public–private contracts that knit government services to corporate surveillance tools. Those experiences sharpened her skepticism of centralized control—whether exercised by a boardroom, a bureaucracy, or an algorithm whose training data no one will disclose. At Just Right News, a conservative news organization, Grant’s beat is the practical reality of digital power. She examines how location brokers can map daily routines, how cars and appliances phone home, how opaque trust-and-safety frameworks can chill lawful speech, and how automated decision systems are creeping into welfare determinations, hiring, lending, and public safety. Her north star is a simple test: does this technology expand individual liberty and accountability, or does it consolidate leverage in the hands of a few and make redress harder for everyone else? Grant is known for work that pairs narrative with technical rigor. She files public records requests, reads procurement contracts and patents, inspects developer documentation, and interviews engineers, civil libertarians, small business owners, and whistleblowers. When she writes about an algorithm, she looks for the training data, the thresholds, the appeal process, and the money trail. When she covers policy, she looks for unintended consequences: mission creep, vendor lock-in, and the risk that “pilot programs” become permanent infrastructures. Her perspective is shaped by a belief in limited government, strong Fourth Amendment protections in the digital realm, property rights over personal data, and due process when automated systems render judgment. She appreciates innovation that makes life better, but insists that consent be meaningful, code paths be auditable, and off-ramps exist for people who opt out. She champions tools that return power to users—local compute, interoperable standards, clear logging and notification—over black boxes that demand trust without verification. From Seattle, Grant watches the Pacific Northwest’s cloud economy up close while covering national trends. She’s most at home explaining how a “harmless” app permission becomes a market in intimate facts, or how a city contract for “AI insights” can change policing and public services. Off deadline, she hikes in the Cascades and repairs old hardware, a reminder that technology should obey its owner. Grant’s goal is straightforward: equip readers to see the system, ask better questions, and defend their freedoms in a world run by code.