Nearly two decades after Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, his legal saga appears to be over with a guilty plea to a single charge of distributing classified documents. His sentence has essentially been served.
The outcome is unlikely to satisfy national security hawks who wanted Assange behind bars in the United States for the significant damage he has caused to the country’s interests, nor America’s First Amendment absolutists. that freedom of the press should extend to WikiLeaks.
The truth is that Assange’s case has always been in the gray area between espionage and protected speech. The outcome has not made that gray area any clearer.
