White haired and spectral thin, Julian Assange roams the world incessantly - rarely sleeping in the same place two nights in a row - due to a growing enemies list.
His goal, Assange said in a recent New Yorker magazine profile, is to expose injustice by revealing secrets that could "bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality - including the U.S. administration."
"WikiLeaks aims to achieve political reforms by getting out information that has been suppressed to the public," he told Voice of America. "As far as we're aware, we've never made a mistake."
Born in an Australian beach town in 1971, Assange was a self-schooled computer hacker who was busted after breaking into a telecom company's master terminal and messaging the administrator, "It's been nice playing with your system."
A successful custody battle with the mother of his only son planted the seed of what would later become WikiLeaks.
Determined to break through the bureaucracy, Assange urged child protection workers to dish to a "central data bank."
WikiLeaks, whose goal is to create an "intelligence service of the people," went online three years ago promising to publish classified documents - after verifying their accuracy.
Since then, WikiLeaks has exposed everything from the inner workings of the Church of Scientology to Sarah Palin's emails.
Amnesty International lauded WikiLeaks for publishing a secret report alleging corruption by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi.
The group's biggest coup - until now - was a shocking video of two Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians being wiped out by a U.S. Apache helicopter attack in 2007.
WikiLeaks has no central office and no paid staff. It relies on volunteers to authenticate documents - and on shadowy supporters to pay the bills.
Assange said they've endured police harassment in Germany and Israel, and maintain server sites around the world to make sure they're not hacked - or knocked off the Web
Wikileaks.org, the online clearinghouse for leaked documents, is working on a plan to make the Web leakier by enabling newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an "upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks" form onto their Web sites.
The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy.
"We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document," said Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks, in an interview at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Once Wikileaks confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a news story or report based on the material.
The embargo period is a key part of the plan, Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention.
"It's counterintuitive," he said. "You'd think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that's absolutely not true. It's about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero."
The final act will be for Wikileaks to publish the material on its Web site after the story has been written and the embargo period lapsed.
"We want to get as much substantive information as possible into the historical record, keep it accessible and provide incentives for people to turn it into something that will achieve political reform," said Assange.
Wikileaks is also working on ways to make browsing throuh the material it receives easier for users.
Onspeed - Faster Internet
Wikileaks often runs into problems concerning how to present material and how to make it easier to sift through for vital information, said Assange.
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
In three years on the Web, Wikileaks published over 1.2 million sensitive documents.
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