Her work covers hacker culture, Anonymous, the Occupy movement, intellectual property and copyright issues, and the Internet.

[4] Her father's struggles with his experience post-Vietnam and his drug-related incarceration[5] inspired her to write later about judicial reform and restorative justice.

[8] Norton began her professional life as a technologist when she worked as a systems administrator and web programmer.

[11] Norton's work has appeared in Wired, where she spent a year embedded with Occupy Wall Street.

[23] The hire drew sharp criticism focused on tweets Norton wrote between 2013 and 2017, particularly use of slurs referring to gay people and her defense of her friendship with Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and white supremacist[24] known as weev.

[30] The incident led to debate over the ethics of free speech in the hacking community at large as well as Times social media policy.

[29] On March 3, 2011, Norton was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury regarding an investigation of her then-partner Aaron Swartz that led to the case United States v.

[34] She ultimately accepted a proffer agreement with the prosecutor, whereby she shared information about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,[35] which defendant Aaron Swartz either wrote or co-wrote.

[36] Articles in The Atlantic and in New York Magazine indicate that in 2011 Norton was pressured by prosecutors to offer information or testimony that could be used against Aaron Swartz in his trial for fraud for downloading thousands of academic articles from behind a paywall, but that she denied having information that supported prosecutors' claims of criminal intentions on Swartz's part.