wikileaks

The brains behind the WikiLeaks website

that posted reams of classified military documents detailing U.S. failures in Afghanistan is a mystery man with secrets of his own.

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.

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com

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