Free at long last: Yesterday, news broke that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would be released from Belmarsh Prison, the maximum security facility he's been kept at in the U.K. for the last five years, and would be free to go home.

Assange, who has been at risk of being extradited to the U.S. and prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing documents—an activity protected by the First Amendment—that the government says contain classified national security information, will plead guilty to a single felony count and return to his native Australia. Prior to reaching this deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange could have faced up to 170 years in prison if extradited to America.

From 2012 to 2019, Assange had been living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, caught in legal limbo and fearing extradition by British authorities. In 2019, Ecuador's president was angered by allegations of corruption made public via WikiLeaks and pulled Assange's asylum protections. The British authorities rounded Assange up and put him in Belmarsh.

To plead guilty and end his legal ordeal, Assange will appear at the courthouse in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands (technically part of the U.S.), and then fly to Australia immediately after.

Though Assange's case has been closely followed by advocates for press freedom, who are thrilled to see him walk free, some also caution that this is "an Espionage Act conviction for basic journalistic acts," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's David Greene, who told The New York Times that "these charges should never have been brought."

"WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions," wrote the organization on X (formerly Twitter). "As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know."

In 2010, WikiLeaks published a video called "Collateral Murder," which showed a 2007 U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in which several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were killed. The organization, which received leaks from various government and military personnel, including the now-famous whistleblower Chelsea Manning, received retribution from the U.S. government for publicizing possible violations of military rules of engagement and showing the extreme brutality of war, including the massive civilian death toll in Iraq at the hands of the U.S. Army.

For more than a decade, Assange was not treated like a journalist, but like a criminal. Now, his ordeal will finally come to a close.

For more on Assange's case, watch this episode of my show with Zach Weissmueller, Just Asking Questions, in which we interviewed Julian's wife, Stella.