After the election, Hillary Clinton argued that the releases had been instrumental in keeping her from the Oval Office. “I love WikiLeaks,” Donald Trump declared, in exultant gratitude. They provoked strikingly disparate receptions. During the Presidential election last year, he published tens of thousands of hacked e-mails written by Democratic operatives, releasing them at pivotal moments in the campaign.

At the same time, Assange’s methodology and his motivations have increasingly come under suspicion. His releases have helped fuel democratic uprisings-notably in Tunisia, where a revolution sparked the Arab Spring-and they have been submitted as evidence in human-rights cases around the world. Encouraged by millions of supporters, Assange has interfered with the world’s largest institutions.

Nonetheless, he has become a global influence, proving that with simple digital tools a single person can craft a new kind of power-a distributed, transnational power, which functions outside norms of state sovereignty that have held for centuries. In the five years since then, he has not set foot beyond the Embassy. Sometimes there is virtually no one, which was the case in June, 2012, when Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, arrived, disguised as a motorcycle courier, to seek political asylum. Sometimes there are throngs of people around it. Sometimes plainclothes police officers, or vans with tinted windows, can be found outside the building. The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next to the Harrods department store, in Knightsbridge.

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