Who is Julian Assange, the polarizing founder of the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks?

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — He emerged on the information security scene in the 1990s as a “famous teenage hacker” following what he called an “ itinerant minstrel childhood” beginning in Townsville, Australia. Since Assange drew global attention in 2010 for his work with prominent news outlets to publish war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other matters, he has provoked fervor among his admirers and loathing from his detractors with little in-between — seen either as a persecuted hero for open and transparent government, or a villain who put American lives at risk by aiding its enemies, and prompting fraught debates about state secrecy and freedom of the press. By 2006, when he founded WikiLeaks, Assange’s delight at being able to traverse locked computer systems seemingly for fun developed into a belief that, as he wrote on his blog, “only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.” In the year of WikiLeaks’ explosive 2010 release of half a million documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the non-profit organization’s website was registered in Sweden and its legal entity in Iceland. “If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.” U.S. prosecutors later said documents published by Assange included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who provided information to American and coalition forces, while the diplomatic cables he released exposed journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and dissidents in repressive countries. Later, after a State Department legal adviser informed him of the risk to “countless innocent individuals” compromised by the leaks, Assange said he would work with mainstream news organizations to redact the names of individuals.