A plea deal brought an abrupt end to an extraordinary legal saga that has raised novel issues of national security, press freedoms, politics and diplomacy.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has long fought extradition from Britain to the United States, agreed on Monday to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act in exchange for a five-year prison sentence.
Under the agreement he will be freed, having already served that time while in British custody. The deal brought an abrupt end to an extraordinary legal saga that has raised novel issues of national security, press freedoms, politics and diplomacy.
Here is a timeline of significant events:
2006
WikiLeaks takes root.
Julian Assange, an Australian computer specialist, founds WikiLeaks with a mission of using the internet to help whistle-blowers bring hidden information to light. Operated by a transnational collective using servers in countries including Iceland and Sweden, it solicits classified, censored or otherwise restricted material for publication online.
2009
An Army intelligence analyst becomes a key contributor.
A U.S. Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning downloads large batches of documents from a classified computer network and begins uploading them to WikiLeaks.
They include a video of a U.S. helicopter strike in Baghdad in which a Reuters photographer was killed, incident logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, more than 250,000 diplomatic cables from American embassies around the world and hundreds of dossiers compiling intelligence allegations against Guantánamo detainees.
2010
WikiLeaks begins publishing the material.
The organization works with mainstream news outlets, including The New York Times. It initially appears that WikiLeaks may have numerous sources inside the U.S. government, and Mr. Assange is propelled to global notoriety. Eventually Ms. Manning is arrested and identified as the source of the wave of secret American documents.