Anonymous started as a joke on internet forums like 4chan and ended up staging real attacks on the Church of Scientology, PayPal, and Middle Eastern governments during the Arab Spring. Director Brian Knappenberger traces that arc through interviews with participants, security researchers, and journalists who watched the movement grow out of trolling culture into something closer to a political weapon. Former members explain the raids on Scientology's websites and the Operation Payback attacks that followed WikiLeaks' banking blockade, while law enforcement officials describe the FBI's push to identify and prosecute the people behind the masks. The film follows several hackers who ended up facing serious charges for actions they saw as protest rather than crime, putting faces and consequences behind an identity built on facelessness. Archival chat logs, news footage, and the Guy Fawkes mask iconography run throughout, but the core of the film is the argument over what Anonymous actually is: a loose collective of pranksters, a leaderless activist network, or something without precedent that existing law has no good name for.