Julian Assange profile: From teenage hacker to head of secret-spilling website that shook the world

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange looks out of an aeroplane window as he approaches Bangkok airport for a layover, in a post by WikiLeaks on X yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Charlotte Graham-McLay and Jill Lawless

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.

But the story of Julian Assange, eccentric founder of secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, never became less strange – or less polarising – after he jolted the US and its allies by revealing secrets of how America conducted its wars.