Beginning with the PATRIOT Act in 2001, Americans embarked on a slide down a dangerous slope, our civil liberties getting buried in the mud one-by-one.
With the Bill of Rights at the top of the hill and "Big Brother" waiting at the bottom, the last seven years have been an increasingly swift spiral downward.
Last week, the American people were able to dig their nails into the muck and inch themselves a few feet back up the hill when a U.S. district judge reversed his prior decision to unconstitutionally censor the Web site Wikileaks.org.
The whistle-blowing Web site allows sources all over the world to securely and anonymously leak a variety of material from military training manuals to evidence of corporate malfeasance.
The injunction against the Web site began when a disgruntled employee released damaging documents relating to Swiss Bank Julius Baer. The bank sued in a U.S. Federal court to have the site shut down.
Judge Jeffrey White's decision to reverse his ruling came amid massive public criticism of the Feb. 15 decision ordering the domain server hosting Wikileaks to take the site offline.
The Wikileaks case echoes many of the same issues involved in the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of the Vietnam War that was leaked to the New York Times in 1971.
The fact is that freedom of information online must be protected because in today's age of media monopolies and dying newspapers, the Internet is really our last hope.
One of the best things to emerge from the Wikileaks case is further evidence of how difficult it will be to censor information online.
When the Wikileaks server was shut down, multiple mirror sites based out of countries such as Belgium continued to make the Baer documents available to the public.
Information the American public needs is not going to be brought to them by a media filled with castrated reporters, corporate media conglomerates and 24-hour broadcast news channels that refuse to fill their news cycle with meaty or in-depth information.
If apathetic readers, lazy reporters and overzealous politicians push us further downhill, the freedom of information offered by the Web is a lifeline we can use to winch ourselves back toward a free society.
Sites like Wikileaks.org, Opensecrets.org and even YouTube.com are leading an information revolution.
This coming revolution will not be brought to us by broadcast suits and cable news.
It will not be printed by media monopolies and corporate papers. The information revolution will be Wikileaked and grassroot-Web site clicked.
