Article content continued

Thanks to his indictment, Doyon is one of the few Anonymous members whose real name is now publicly known.

But as the leader of the People’s Liberation Front — a hacker group allied with Anonymous — and the second-most wanted information activist after WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, he prefers not to show his face, and instead dons the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask, to wear with his Sunday best: a sweatshirt with the Anonymous calling card, “We do not forgive … We do not forget.”

Terrorists to some, heroes to others, the jury is still out on Anonymous’s true nature. Known for its robust defence of Internet freedom – and the right to remain anonymous — Anonymous came in first place in Time Magazine’s 2012 online poll on the most influential person in the world.

Fox News, on the other hand, has branded the hackers “domestic terrorists,” a role Anonymous has been cast to play in the latest Call of Duty Black Ops II, in which Anonymous appears as the enemy who takes control of unmanned drones in the not-too-distant future. (That creative decision may have put Activision, the creator of the video-game series, at the top of the Anonymous hit list.) For its part, much of what Anonymous does and says about itself, in the far reaches of the Internet, cannot be verified. Nor do all Anons agree on who they are as a group, and where they are going.

— — — — —

Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?

A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, “Holy s— I’m really strong!” Scientology (one of Anonymous’s first targets) was the punch in the face where Anonymous began to realize how incredibly powerful they are. There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth. The entire world right now is run by information. Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that’s what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s? It’s the geeks and computer hackers of the world.