MONTREAL—At 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 14, Gabriella Coleman dragged herself from the bedroom of her apartment to her desk, where her laptop had sat running overnight.

Coleman, a McGill University professor, toggled between windows of a chat client, trying to catch up. Some kind of vote was underway. The context was hazy. Finally, she pieced it all together.

Anons, as members of the shapeshifting online collective Anonymous are known, had potentially uncovered the name of the police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking weeks of protests . Their evidence seemed shaky, though.

Getting the name wrong would mean renewed portrayals of Anonymous as dangerous, immature hackers. Getting it right meant being cast in their most complimentary incarnation: as mischievous cyber-populists who remould the media agenda in their image and hold the powerful to account.

For a bleary Coleman, either way meant a maelstrom. As the world’s foremost — and pretty much only — scholar on Anonymous, she has become the lightning rod that attracts the world’s crackling media whenever Anonymous does something newsworthy, which is often.

Coleman is an anthropologist. Had she been a different kind of scholar, her experience might have been different. But just as traditional anthropologists might live amid a village or tribe to observe their customs, Coleman spent years “living” online, logging long days and sleepless nights in a quest to understand the language, culture and ethical codes of a notoriously amorphous group. As Anonymous evolved from pranksters to political “hacktivists,” taking on targets from the Church of Scientology to African autocrats, she was one of a tiny few watching courtside.

That perspective has put Coleman in demand, and informs her soon-to-be-published book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous . But it has also pitched her into sticky ethical positions, and often left her exhausted, paranoid, and, after the FBI zeroed in on Anonymous, potentially a target.

“I’m not a full insider,” she says. “At the same time, I’m not a full outsider, either.”

When Anons rang in 2014 quietly, Coleman pondered new projects. Then came flare-ups of activity — and, finally, Ferguson.

Anonymous released the wrong name. “Things were crazy.”

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Coleman planned to study spiritual healers in Guyana. But she fell ill and, unable to travel or even attend classes, she found herself spending more and more time online. When she recovered, she realized she hadn’t fallen behind on her Guyanese project so much as become embedded in a fascinating new world: that of open-source software hackers.

Very few anthropologists were examining electronic culture. “It was pretty unusual,” says Jean Comaroff, her graduate adviser. Amid these new technologies, “she saw very familiar debates about ethics, about knowledge, about enclosure or public openness — about freedom really.”

Yet Comaroff tried to warn Coleman off the project. Anthropologists usually work for geographically based faculties: Comaroff, who studies post-colonial South Africa, now works for Harvard’s department of African and African-American studies. Coleman’s research had no corresponding place in the physical world, and Comaroff feared that Coleman wouldn’t find a job within the analog-era infrastructure of academia.

She did. Her research created a stir, and after stints at New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she moved to Montreal in 2012 to accept her “dream job”: the Wolfe chair in scientific and technological literacy at McGill. (Comaroff wasn’t wrong: Coleman is officially attached to the art history and communication studies department.)

By then, her research focus had shifted. In 2007, Fox News dubbed a largely unknown group of Internet trolls the “Internet Hate Machine.” Fox was responding to hijinks that included invading Habbo Hotel, a social media community popular with Finnish teens. The pranksters gave their avatars the same digital disguise — a grey suit and an Afro — and picketed the hotel’s pool, forming human swastikas and declaring it “closed due to fail and AIDS.”

The group had grown out of a free-for-all online image and message board called 4chan, where users are given the moniker “Anonymous” by default and where gross and offensive content rules the day. The stated motivation for this offshoot collective was “lulz,” a term derived from LOL — “a deviant style of humour and a quasi-mystical state of being,” as Coleman explains in her book.

Media attention seemed to breathe life into this strange golem. It certainly fortified them during their next, distinctly more high-profile operation: taking down the Church of Scientology. In lulzy fashion, Anons ordered mystery pizzas and faxed reams of black paper to church offices. They also disabled the Scientology website and joined real-life protests .

Coleman, trying to write a book on open-source hackers that would be important to future tenure decisions, was rapt.

“She really got sucked into this,” says Christopher Kelty, an anthropologist at UCLA who straddles the same techno-anthro world. “But it is to her credit that she knew she was onto something interesting. That’s a rare commodity in academia, that research intuition.”

By late 2010, Biella, as she is known online and off, was a constant presence on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), logging on for five hours daily at minimum. She lurked in debates and discussions about future “ ops ” (operations), trying to interpret the cacophony of jargon and shifting usernames.

It was exhausting, Coleman says. But just like field work in the physical world, “if you only go once or twice, you may not see the conflicts that are a part of a social group.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Anons grew to trust her, but acceptance did not correspond to a reduction in anxiety. Anonymous had become increasingly political and increasingly powerful, taking on targets like the repressive Tunisian and Egyptian governments and PayPal , which had frozen donations to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. Two favourite tactics were DDoSing, or disabling a website with a flood of requests, and doxing, dumping personal information (social insurance numbers, home addresses) online.

Mainstream media lapped it up. But they often painted Anonymous as an organized group of hackers, or sought leaders to profile. In reality, anyone can adopt the mantle of Anonymous. There are shifting internal allegiances and fierce disagreements about philosophy, tactics and targets. Few Anons are hardcore hackers, and fame-seekers are ostracized. Anons are also not the pasty teenage losers that reporters assume: Anonymous skews heavily male, but includes parents, people of colour, queer members, and more.

Coleman, practising what anthropologists call “participant observation,” became Anonymous’ chief interpreter, fielding countless calls from reporters and shaping their stories into more accurate — but also often more flattering — narratives.

“What she did as a participant was to broker these relationships and educate journalist after journalist after journalist about the culture,”

says Kelty. “Biella is this really great liminal figure who can do that.”

Anthropology has different standards of objectivity than journalism. Yet it was impossible not to grow uncomfortably close to Anonymous, says Quinn Norton, a tech reporter and another of the few observers invited in.

“Anonymous is basically a giant creature of attention,” says Norton. “By speaking about it and speaking to it, you create it. That is ethically a difficult position for an anthropologist or a journalist to be in.”

Anonymous’ increasingly brazen exploits also ratcheted up law enforcement interest. Unlike journalists or lawyers, academics enjoy no source-protection privileges. Coleman urged Anons not to brag about their hacking exploits to her, and stayed out of discussions of illegal ops. But a spate of arrests, including that of Barrett Brown, a similar insider-outsider unofficial spokesperson, sowed paranoia.

Then, in March 2012, Fox News outed Hector Xavier Monsegur , a key figure in two Anonymous hacker-offshoot groups, as an FBI informant. Coleman had met Monsegur in person and chatted with him often online. He repeatedly asked about Jacob Appelbaum, a friend of Coleman’s who is a hacker and Tor developer, software that provides online anonymity. Coleman still doesn’t know whether Monsegur’s questions were fed to him by FBI handlers, though it seems likely.

With key figures arrested, Anonymous was less often in the headlines. But the Ferguson doxing fiasco brought all the reporters running. The next day, authorities released the real officer’s name. Some believed Anonymous forced that concession to transparency, while critics, including other Anons, say they simply incited chaos.

But chaos has always animated Anonymous, down to its very structure. “You can’t arrest an idea,” one Anon tweeted shortly before being arrested himself.

Chaos would not be a bad word to describe the role of Anonymous in the life of their favourite anthropologist, either.