From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroef, and this is the Daily.

When the long legal saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came to an end this summer,

it marked the first time that the US government had convicted anyone for

publishing classified material.

In the week since, my colleague Charlie Savage has been thinking about what that conviction means for journalism and government accountability in a world where publishing state secrets

can now be treated as a crime.

It's Thursday, August 1st.

Charlie, Julian Assange, once a household name, really faded from public view over the last few years,

and then he roared right back into it with a guilty plea a few weeks ago.

You've covered him this entire time. How were you thinking about him and his

legacy when that guilty plea came down? So Joining Assange is one of the most

interesting people of our times,

and his saga is an extraordinarily complex

and twisting one.

Who he is or was, his status evolved over time. Was he the radical internet-based transparency extremist who facilitated

the publication of leaked government U.S., bringing huge amounts of information to the public about how the world really worked?

Or is he the guy who published Democratic emails in 2016 that had been hacked by Russia as part of a covert

intelligence operation to help Donald Trump win that election and really from

my point of view as someone who's interested in journalism and press freedoms, it doesn't really

matter who he was because he became the first person in the history of the United States to be convicted of violating the Espionage Act

as someone who gathered and then disseminated to the public information that the government wanted kept secret.

And so his case ends with establishing a precedent that will be very important

...