How did Anonymous make the leap from a rather amusing anti-Scientology society to a global protest movement whose force was felt in the highest circles of power? Well, as Anonymous anthropologist Gabriella Coleman describes it in her upcoming book on the hacking collective, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, it was a bit of a fluke. But it happened because of PayPal and the company's financial blockade against the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks.

In early December 2010, someone launched an online attack against PayPal in the name of Anonymous. PayPal had joined with MasterCard and Visa in refusing to process donations to WikiLeaks, following the site's release of classified government information. At the time, Anonymous was a small group, winding down a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks against the Motion Picture Association of America. But the PayPal attack was done by someone new—not by a regular participant.

One member of the core group—Coleman gives him the pseudonym Radwaddie in her book—decided to tell a blogger, Panda Security's Sean-Paul Correll, that the group had done it. It wasn't strictly true, but when word got out that a shadowy hacker collective called Anonymous was defending WikiLeaks against the PayPal blockade, thousands of people jumped on board.

>There's a way in which Scientology is the perfect nemesis for the geek and hacker world.

The move caused conflict within Anonymous, and a debate about whether DDoS attacks were an expression of free speech or, rather, a way of suppressing it. "When people found out that he had gone ahead and fibbed and claimed this DDoS as their own, everyone got super-mad at him for violating consensus protocol," Coleman says. "And then all of a sudden the tide kind of turned and people were like, 'You have a point. We do DDoS, and this is a good cause so why don't we go for it?'"

At the time, Anonymous was run by a core group of 15 to 20 people, with maybe another few hundred who would jump onboard during high-profile events—chiefly protests against the Church of Scientology and the Motion Picture Association of America. But after the PayPal attack, a global movement was born. Within days, close to 8,000 people at a time were flocking to some of the Anonymous IRC channels. People downloaded software called the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) and used it to DDoS PayPal in attacks that prosecutors claimed cost the company $5.5 million. Anonymous "really provided a platform through which people who were quite angry at the banking blockade, could express their discontent," Coleman says.

After PayPal, the group's mix of bluster, hacking and activism proved irresistible to the press. The group was so effective at grabbing headlines and spilling documents that, incredibly, the NSA began to worry that it might some day attack the U.S. power grid – something that Anonymous never considered, Coleman says.

A Work of Anthropology

The PayPal incident is one of many interesting stories about this ill-understood group that Coleman details in her new book, due out in November. It's a work of anthropology that sometimes echoes a John le Carré novel, as Coleman, in George Smiley fashion, triangulates and tracks down the history of the murky group. Coleman went deep. She spent years living with Anonymous—in virtual fashion, at least—earning the trust of key members of the group and proofing press releases.

It's a research project that happened quite by accident. A decade ago, Coleman had spent time with open-source geeks in the Bay Area (WIRED interviewed her about her experiences there back in 2012), and she decided to study the long-running conflict between geeks and the Church of Scientology, a conflict that dates back to the days of usenet, where activists used the nascent internet to post information about the Church, and Scientologists did their best to take that information down.

Then, in 2007, Anonymous appeared on the scene. Its mission: to mock and annoy Scientology. Coleman figured it was "the next chapter" in her research. "I do think there's a way in which Scientology is the perfect nemesis for the geek and hacker world. It's kind of the evil doppelganger of hacking because Scientology is a religion of science and technology, and it's really faux science and faux technology," she says. "A hacker's worst nightmare would be waking up one morning and their partner would say, darling you know I'm really a Scientologist."

Coleman follows Anonymous through from its early days through to splinter groups LulzSec and then AntiSec, to the criminal prosecutions of many of its core members. It's the chronicle of a once-fringe group that captured the attention of the entire world. At times, it's a confusing tale, but that's to be expected. In fact, that's really the point. Anonymous wouldn't want to be predictable or consistent. It's a banner that anyone can seize—even people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. As Coleman writes in her book: "Beyond a foundational commitment to the maintenance of anonymity and a broad dedication to the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program."