
We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
Anonymous started as a loose prank culture on 4chan message boards and grew into a force that knocked banks offline, backed the Arab Spring, and drew FBI raids on teenagers' bedrooms. Director Brian Knappenberger traces that path through interviews with former members, security researchers, and journalists who covered the group's campaigns against Scientology, PayPal, and Mastercard. The film walks through key operations one by one: the 2008 Chanology protests outside Scientology centers, the Operation Payback attacks defending WikiLeaks, and the Arab Spring hacks that fed banned footage back into Tunisia and Egypt. Court records and FBI interrogation footage sit alongside firsthand accounts from people who faced real prison time for actions organized in chat rooms under names instead of faces. The film treats Anonymous less as a single organization than as a tactic anyone can pick up, and lets its subjects argue openly about what that means: liberation technology, a criminal network, or something that keeps shifting shape faster than the law can define it.