Julian Assange is free at last – but his case will have a chilling impact on us all

The treatment of the WikiLeaks founder is a victory for government and the secret state, writes Alan Rusbridger. In an age when our deepest secrets can be spied on, we need bright-light wielders like Assange and Edward Snowden

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives in Bangkok, en route to Australia after five years in a British jail (@WikiLeaks/PA)

The end came not with a bang, but with a blurred image of a figure – which only emerged while most of us were asleep – boarding a plane at Stansted airport.

Julian Assange had become something of an embarrassment – the centre of a legal battle that threatened to make Charles Dickens’s fictional Jarndyce v Jarndyce case in Bleak House look like a brief squabble over a parking ticket.

He had already spent more than five years, at who knows what cost, in a UK maximum security prison, with the prospect of years more to come, as his legal team fought to prevent him from being extradited to the US to spend still more time in jail.