Hacker News Reader

They were indeed a hacker group at one point. The "everyone is Anonymous" thing worked as an effective smokescreen for a while, and a pool for recruiting. It's like gaming, or sports: tons of people do it casually on the edges, and a handful at the top do it at a very high level for high stakes.

Eventually they moved beyond fun, simple little social causes to more seriously disruptive and economically/politically dangerous stuff, and at that point, not surprisingly, the alphabet agencies slipped in and broke up the party.

"the hacker known as 4chan"

Curious definition of 'kids trolling', I have to say.

DDoS attacks as well as actual hacks were performed in the name of 'Anonymous', and at the time of the Stratfor hack, various LulzSec members were already in their late twenties...