Anonymous — the amorphous online conglomerate who like to rumble with Scientologists and 11-year-old camwhores — usually live up to their name. The group (if you can even call it that) very rarely appears in public, and when they do, they typically hide their faces under signature Guy Fawkes masks.

But on a recent Saturday in February, a small group of self-professed Anons — teens with braces and glasses, twentysomethings with stubble hiding under dark hoods — marched maskless through downtown Boston, shouting: "WikiLeaks is under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!"

The meatspace rally was organized through the website whyweprotest.net, by self-professed Anon Gregg Housh, a 34-year-old Boston computer geek. Housh offered himself as a leader for the protesters. "At some point you have to tell them to do all the stuff or they won't," he says. "No matter where I go in life that's how it is."