"It was difficult for us at the beginning," she told CNN. "We had a person living here 24 hours a day and we didn't know that person, his habits. How he was going to react to confinement.

"What was not normal at the beginning has become normal. He is another one of us here. Somebody that we count on, we talk to, we worry about when we think something has happened to him. We have now an extended and better run family."

His case has become a cause celebre, with Lady Gaga dropping by for tea and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood visiting to display her "I Am Julian Assange" T-shirt.

Small things have changed since I first met him. His white hair, once chin-length has been cropped short. He has ditched his T-shirts and leather jacket for a formal suit and tie. He's far more media savvy now, at times sounding more like a politician than a former-hacker-turned-activist of global renown.

But other things remain the same. He talks passionately about forcing transparency to transform and reform governments and bureaucracies, happily engaging in long debates. He still sees the world's mainstream media as utterly failing in that regard and he's still prone to making grandiose statements.

He's more guarded in interviews now. But occasionally you see some of his mischievous humour peeking through.

In the interview, I asked him whether he considers himself as a dissident against Western governments. Here's how he answered: "No. To be a dissident is simply to take the opposite position."

He added: "You can think of WikiLeaks as simply a function of education. We are just like a library. We collect information about the way the world works. We publish historic documents. And yes, we take the hardest possible case. We look for those things which are very hard to publish and support the rights of publishers and fight for their rights.

"Why do we do that? Well, because we want to live in a better world. But also because it's fun."