Internet Freedom

"And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak."
-James Russell Lowell
It is a common thing in human history that when people seek to destroy each other it gives strong impetus to develop new technology. These new tools that come from conflict almost always have dual applications for killing and living. Swords to plowshares and hydrogen bombs to nuclear power, it is part of our species trajectory, c'est la vie. Just such an invention is the internet. It's origins lay in the Cold War, when the US leadership panicked at the launch of Sputnik. They consequently created DARPA in an attempt to gain a technological lead over the Soviets and create a data communication link between various military sites. Over the next decades this technology was utilized for non military use by a variety of institutions. On 6 August 1991 CERN essentially published what we know today as the internet and it quickly started expanding at a rate of 100% annually through the 90's. As we all know the internet is primarily used for consumerism these days, with pornography and online ordering being the most popular uses. It however does have another more interesting use, the ability to publish absolutely any point of view. Liu Xiaobo, recent winner of the Nobel Prize and Chinese prisoner, published essays online that led to his incarceration, probably for the rest of his life. So why would the West, in particular America, forfeit its beloved moral high ground to go after one Julian Assange? It was already established in the 19th century with the ubiquity of the printing press that although the spread of seditious thoughts were dangerous and shook power to its foundations, it ended up just requiring a larger and more complex bureaucracy with democratic trappings, which in the end infinitely strengthened state power. So I repeat my question, why the assault on one man and one site in a sea of such entities trying desperately to stick it to the system? Their is only one logical answer I can come up with, they wanted a pretext for internet crackdown and someone such as Assange who would stand up and be counted because he is a believer played into their plans perfectly. It was likely at some point that proof of US military action violating international law was going to surface anyway, and if you cared to look into such things already had. By making this a matter of one man and freedom of speech they are not only starting the internet freedom debate on advantageous grounds, they are also making the issue of US military conduct an issue of secondary importance, which in the short memory of the modern media relegates it to oblivion. To my mind this seems a sad story of a man seeking to reveal the truth but failing to realize the ability of those he seeks to defame to turn absolutely every act of resistance into a justification for consolidating their power. As I am almost always want to do, I must end with quotes from greats in order to give this situation the profundity I seek: "We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it." -JFK
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn