New chapter What next for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks?

As Julian Assange enjoyed his first weekend of freedom in years, there appeared to be no question in the mind of his wife, Stella, about what the family's priorities were.

- Ben Quinn

The WikiLeaks co-founder would need time to recover, she told reporters after they were reunited in his native Australia, after a deal with US authorities that allowed him to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents.

What comes after that is an intriguing question for anyone familiar with how the site he founded in 2006 utterly changed the nature of whistleblowing. Will it return to its original mission?

While it remains online - and would be whistleblowers can theoretically use it to pass on secrets - the organisation around it has been repurposed in recent years to campaign for Assange's freedom.

Assange himself told the Nation magazine in an interview inside Belmarsh prison, London, that it had not been possible to publish leaks due to his imprisonment, US government surveillance and funding restrictions.

Other issues are also starkly unavoidable, not least the fact that the type of encryption technology and other processes that WikiLeaks in many ways pioneered now exist in every good news organisation.