Anonymous Movie Premieres At SXSW: We Are Legion: The Story Of The Hacktivists [TRAILER]

A documentary focused on Anonymous, an online, international collective made up of hackers, video programmers and geeks, premiered at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The film features interviews with a number of anthropologists and experts on the subject of online activism, anonymous interviews with self-proclaimed members of the group who often hide their faces behind iconic Guy Fawkes masks, and footage from Anonymous organized rallies and riots protesting a variety of governments and corporations but often focusing on censorship, particularly on the internet.

The film was directed by Brian Knappenberger, and attempts to fact check the efforts of governments and corporate lobbyists to label Anonymous as a terrorist organization. The film includes an interview with hacktivist researched and anthropologist Grabielle Coleman. You can read an interview with Coleman here.

Anonymous, which first formed on the online image message board called 4Chan, where users often posted the most inappropriate and taboo photos they could find, grew a political arm when they declared war on the Church of Scientology, and attempted to expose it's corrupt practices. Since then the hacktivist collective have taken up a number of causes, allying itself with the Arab Spring protesters as well as Wikileaks and Julian Assange.

Its most common form of protest is conduct online through Denial of Service attacks in which members, who call themselves Anons, repeatedly send messages to a chosen website in order to overload the site and shut it down temporarily in order to disrupt a corporation or Government and draw attention to corruption and immorality. Hacktivists have also taken control of 'enemy' websites in the past, replacing their homepages with the groups own messages and videos.