Circa 2010 and 2011, a year or so before I joined the staff of Ars Technica, I had followed the online antics of Anonymous from a distance. I knew the rough outline of Anonymous, its initial motives (“for the lulz”) and its consequences, such as the legendary (and hilarious) hack of security firm HBGary Federal , as reported in these hallowed pages.

But what I didn’t fully grasp until now was the full, complex and rich play-by-play story provided by somebody who knows the group as well as any bona fide Anon: Biella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University. Her new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy deftly chronicles the rise of Anonymous, and the fall of many of its most prominent members.

The tome details her time embedding with Anonymous in its IRC lairs, and even meets a few of them in person, including the recently released government informant Hector Xavier Monsegur, better known by his online handle, Sabu. (Who knew he was gluten-free?)

Coleman’s reporting is comprehensive—she quotes at length from IRC transcripts, and brings in other academic and anthropological sources not commonly found in other tech books. Her detailed account is certainly compelling, particularly for someone like me who only had a passing knowledge of Anonymous, but by the end of the book, I was left wondering: what now?

Following the arrests of a notable handful of the most public leaders of the group, it seems that the group and its followers have largely gotten the wind knocked out of its sails. Yes, there have been small-scale “ops” over the last two years, but 2014’s “Operation Ferguson” resulted in the publication of a police officer who had nothing do with the killing of Michael Brown.

Like Adrian Chen’s December 2014 review of Hacker, Hoaxer, I too am not convinced of the staying power of Anonymous’ hacktivism. While I’m sure that Anonymous, in some form or another is still kicking around in the bowels of IRC, but I’m not certain that its physical protests, online ops, DDOS attacks, have had many (if any) lasting effects. After all, despite its famously decentralized nature, a number of its prominent members have been arrested. One former member, Barrett Brown, is due to be sentenced in federal court later this month after taking a plea deal nine months ago.

Coleman compiles a laundry list of ops, and boldly concludes early on that Anonymous “could be found at the heart of hundreds of political ‘ops’—becoming integral, even, to some of the most compelling political struggles of our age.” To wit, in 2014 and now 2015, Anonymous has had zero influence on the Syrian civil war, the conflict in Ukraine, or the fight against Islamic State, to name a few.

Moralfags v. lulz-seekers

The second chapter of Hacker, Hoaxer details 2008’s Project Chanology, the first real Anonymous op. Like many people, I hadn’t heard of Anonymous until that now-famous creepy video, “Message to Scientology,” hit YouTube. April 2008 marked the apotheosis of protests against the Church of Scientology, with protests in many cities worldwide.

Among other things, Coleman uses the Project Chanology episode as an occasion to explore the “binary between moralfags and ‘hardened’ lulz-seekers” in Anonymous’ core roots. While many online activists first found Anonymous as part of its anti-Scientology flare-up, the book also details how easily lulz can go dark.

She quotes an Anon whom she gives the IRC handle “CPU” as saying on March 16, 2008:

We should just hit a random forum for the lulz. Anyone remember the emetophobia raids? <CPU> I’m searching for a forum lol. <CPU> oh lol http:///www.suicideforum.com/ <CPU> First person to push someone to the edge wins? … Or we could find an epilepsy forum and spam it with flashing gifs or something? <XB> http://www.epilepsyforum.org.uk gogogogogo

In 2012, someone made good on this suggestion (Coleman dubs it “morally reprehensible”), but she uses the dichotomy between the Anonymous’ fun-seeking roots and its morphing into a politically motivated group that can be riled up once it finds the right target.

Anonymous is not a united front, but a hydra—comprising numerous different networks. Even within a single project there are working groups that are often at odds with one another—not to mention the civil wars between different nodes of Anonymous more generally. But even if Anons don’t always agree about what is being done under the auspices of Anonymous, they tend to respect the fact that anyone can assume the moniker. The mask, which has becomes its signature icon, functions as an eternal beacon, broadcasting the symbolic value of equality, even in the face of bitter divisions and inequalities.

While obviously the Church of Scientology still persists, Coleman concludes that Anonymous “altered the game so fundamentally that critics could now stand confidently under the sun without fear of reprisal.” While I’m hardly an expert on Scientology, there have been numerous protests, articles, and books written on the subject well before and well after Anonymous came along.

Arrests galore

Similarly, over four years ago, the Tunisian Revolution began—sparked by a produce vendor in a small town who set himself on fire. A handful of online Tunisians “spammed the shit out of the link to the channel #optunisia everywhere” as a way to get others interested in the brewing protests in their home country.

In the end, Anons lead the charge in DDOSing Tunisian government websites, and providing some (admittedly useful) digital care packages, including Greasemonkey scripts and copies of Tor. While the group did wage its relatively tiny battles online, absent from the story is any mention of large-scale professional strikes by Tunisia's professional class of lawyers and teachers, culminating in the fleeing of President Ben Ali on January 14, 2011. Coleman nevertheless trumpets that Anonymous "achieved so much" in the North African state. (Just last month, The Economist named Tunisia as its country of the year.)

But the core of the book is the telling of Anonymous’ most epic win: the hacking of HBGary Federal, in February 2011.

As Ars Technica reported at the time (and in greater detail in the e-book Unmasked), Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary Federal, a semi-obscure security company, announced that he had linked the online handles of Anons to their real identities and was preparing to share that information with federal authorities. Instead, Barr and HBGary Federal got hacked themselves, with Anonymous taking over 70,000 company e-mails and other documents.

For someone like me who had only a passing familiarity with the story as a whole, it was interesting to see and read first-hand the now-famous transcripts that include the line: “keep in mind we have all your e-mails.”

So what happened to HBGary Federal (and its corporate parent, HBGary) after its epic fail? By February 2012, the company was sold to ManTech, another digital security firm. Presumably its digital defenses have been noticeably hardened—but nevertheless, the underlying corporate goal remains the same as it ever was.

By the end of the book (and many ops later) Coleman implies that Anonymous belongs in the pantheon of Internet heros—like Julian Assange, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Edward Snowden.

While the story of Anonymous is fueled by lulz, it seems that the group has largely just fizzled out.

As Ars' own Peter Bright wrote in March 2012: