Almost 20 years after Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, his legal saga appears to be over with a guilty plea to a single charge of disseminating classified documents. His sentence is, essentially, time served.
The outcome is unlikely to satisfy either national security hawks who wanted Assange behind bars in the United States for the substantial damage he did to the country’s interests, or U.S. First Amendment absolutists who think freedom of the press should extend to WikiLeaks.
The truth is that Assange’s case was always in the gray area between espionage and protected speech. Its outcome has not made that gray area any more distinct.