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

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.