In discussion forums, contributions from non-registered individuals are published under the pseudonym ‘Anonymous’. The Anonymous group of hacktivists selected this title, amongst other reasons, to ensure anonymity for its members, partly through fear of retaliation from the Church of Scientology, but above all as a way of preserving this community’s libertarian approach to life arising from its aversion to authority and the personality cult. It is also a way of suggesting that behind each individual there lurks an Anonymous entity who at any moment could ‘take up arms’ and join the group in the battle against the enemy.

At the beginning of 2008, a group of hacktivists, in a reversal of the conventions of militant action and by exploiting the way the media works, used an Internet publicity campaign lasting just a few weeks to mobilise more than 11,000 individuals in over 80 cities throughout the world to carry out more than 140 simultaneous demonstrations and militant actions against the Church of Scientology. Such an achievement demonstrates the reach of a well-organised communication campaign across the global network.

Anonymous⁽¹⁾ was born on the forum of the 4chan.org site, dedicated to Japanese mangas. This site was set up in 2003 by an administrator named Moot who was convinced that if all contributors to the forum were anonymous, their comments would be read with no preconceptions. Pseudonyms were therefore systematically replaced by ‘Anonymous’, thus making the site a hive of ideas expressed by authors who could never be identified. There are other ‘x-chans’ such as 711chan.org but 4chan.org remains the most popular. Alexa, a company that specializes in tracking Internet sites, lists it as the 56th most frequently consulted site worldwide.⁽²⁾