Anonymous is not a cohesive group that all follows the same line of thinking.
Anyone can claim to be part of "Anonymous". It's a political movement. A very diverse political movement that believes in an uncensored internet.
Anonymous is not a political movement. It is a culture. There are elements/actors within Anonymous who are political activists.
Anonymous used a DDoS system called the "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" which was named after an old game or something in an old game. It's free to download, open source and completely legal. This DDoS system was used to attack Scientology.
This is misleading. LOIC is legal depending on how you use it. Technically it is a DoS. the extra 'D' stands for distributed. By itself, LOIC is not distributed. It is named after an in-game weapon in Command & Conquer.
The battle with Scientology led to a clash of ideas within the Anonymous movement. This led to some people hacking flashing black and white gifs into epilepsy forums and calling the other members of the Anonymous movement "moral fags".
moralfags. one word. 'fag' is used as a suffix. it was coined because some sought to use Anonymous as a force for good, whereas previously the consensus was more 'chaotic nuetral'.
A former secret service agent "HBGary" said he had hacked Anonymous and knew who they were. HBGary runs a private intelligence and security company. Anonymous hacked him easily in retaliation and in the process exposed an attack against WikiLeaks that was planned by his corporation. The proposed attack against WikiLeaks included attacking Glenn Greenwald.
Aaron Barr, not HBGary. HBGary is/was the private security intelligence company.
After Sony went after the guy who figured out to have modded Playstations, Anonymous along with other unknown individuals attacked Sony and broke into the network. Around this time the group "LulzSec" appeared. LulzSec was made up of some former Anonymous members. LulzSec wanted to take things to the next level and hack whoever they deemed needed to be hacked. This thinking was radically different from Anonymous which did not go looking for targets.
"the guy who modded playstations" is GeoHotz. He is also known as being the person who discovered how to jailbreak the iPhone. LulzSec were/are members of Anonymous. They made their own cell. Anonymous does look for targets - its called 'raiding', and historically was done for fun and/or for laughs at the expense of others, which is best defined by the term schadenfreude.
Anonymous helped organize protests for various issues in the US. There is also a famous photo of Polish law makers holding Anonymous masks over their faces.
It is not the Anonymous mask. It is known amongst anons as the EFG mask, or Epic Fail Guy. It is a joke online, and was used during Chanology so that Co$ would not be able to identify and harass people. unfortunately, since the media was all over 10k kids randomly showing up and yelling at a cult, it has been projected as the symbol of Anonymous and that Chanology is also when Anonymous started. This is not true. It is simply the first, and probably only, time all of the elements of Anonymous came together and fought against the same enemy to a hilarious and successful end.
Wikipedia actually has a fairly accurate account of the notable moments and history; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29