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Hillary Clinton is back, lecturing the world on internet freedom, but thirteen months after her original speech on the topic, the dimension of the debate has changed. Back then she targeted the Chinese, whom she could confidently and credibly criticise in the wake of attacks on Google.

Last year, the secretary of state made her position clear, warning that "countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century" – a pointed criticism of China's 'great firewall' approach to a technology that many previously thought inherently democratising.

Yet after the WikiLeaks affair it is harder for the United States to so readily moralise. It is only two months ago that WikiLeaks saw its US domain name briefly taken away. Julian Assange's site was also stripped of its ability to raise money via PayPal, MasterCard and Visa.

And her speech comes on the day that civil rights organisations are in court in Virginia trying to stop the government snooping on the details of private Twitter accounts. The internet has hummed with criticism about US double standards.

Clinton mostly bulldozed past this point on Tuesday – choosing simply to assert the same set of principles again. "We are convinced that an open internet fosters long-term peace, progress and prosperity. The reverse is also true. An internet that is closed and fractured, where different governments can block activity or change the rules on a whim – where speech is censored or punished, and privacy does not exist – that ... is an internet that can cut off opportunities for peace and progress and discourage innovation and entrepreneurship," she told her audience at George Washington University.

So what about WikiLeaks? State department officials briefing about her remarks made two points behind closed doors. One point is legitimate – that the US will "always oppose the leaking of confidential information". But that fails to explain why WikiLeaks was so heavily penalised, even though the official line remains, rather implausibly, that it suffered no sanction at the behest of the US government. Instead the likes of MasterCard and Visa were simply acting, in the words of her officials, in accordance with their terms of service "without having been called to do by the Obama administration".

In a way this is all a pity and a distraction. Her argument about the importance of internet freedom is fundamental: although the Egyptian revolution carried on despite the brief shutdown of the mobile phone network, the overthrow of Murbarak was certainly enabled by it (and a regime unable to fight back online).

But her argument is tarnished by WikiLeaks, for it is too easy to say that the US failed to maintain the principles of internet freedom at a moment when its own structure of secrecy was threatened.