Glenn Greenwald, one of the few men in the world with access to all of Edward Snowden's leaks, went on Real Time With Bill Maher last month. It's typically a lion's den in there—a gang-up against the guest that disagrees with Maher the most—and while Maher respected Greenwald, he wondered if Snowden had done the right thing.

Then Paul Rieckhoff spoke up. He's the founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He wondered why, if Snowden believed in this so much, he didn't just man up, come home, and potentially face life in prison. And why was he in Russia, anyway?

"Oh, that is such bullshit," Greenwald said, aggrieved.

He was exasperated by this, and so was the audience. They whooped and hollered and applauded Greenwald, and they went against the host, for once—an act of defiance. The crowd finally went against the guy with his name on the door.

According to a poll last month, 55 percent of Americans believe that Edward Snowden did the right thing. Eighty-one percent now believe that their personal information is being intercepted or analyzed. President Obama, by contrast, has a 42 percent approval rating. Congress is at 13 percent.

The first leak in The Guardian was only 13 months ago.

When George Washington University asked prospective attendees for a "role model" in college essays this year, admissions officers are seeing a lot of Edward Snowden.

Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to be softening her stance on Snowden this weekend.

"He has a right to mount a defense," she said. "And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defense and a public defense, which can of course affect the legal defense."

At every step in the past year, those in power who have tried to inhibit the free flow of information—from the NSA's non-disclosure of its wiretapping to the FCC's flailing attempts to create a fast lane for the wealthier on the Internet—have lost the majority of public support.

This is not a partisan idea. Dick Cheney's Vice Presidency kept his strategic direction for the NSA in a sealed vault across the street from the White House and to this day defends wiretapping programs vehemently. President Obama campaigned on the restriction of warrantless wiretapping and did a 180 after taking office.

America is now a country with a majority populace open to—and even rooting on—the idea that the best way to kill corruption and spur on innovation is to make information available for all. And it's even willing to go against its elected officials to make that happen.

But this didn't start with Edward Snowden. This started with Aaron Swartz.

Frederick Florin/AFP

Before Aaron Swartz was prosecuted to death by the American justice system—namely by Massachusetts District Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant DA Stephen Heymann, who still have their jobs—he co-founded Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the Internet and the place where concentrated, single-issue activism on the Web is allowed to thrive.

When he was alive, Swartz fought to answer one, big question.

"What kind of Internet do we want?"

That's what Brian Knappenberger says, anyway, and that's why he made a movie about Swartz's activism. The film follows all 26 years of Aaron Swartz's life, from his time as a kid computer genius to his push as an advocate for free information to the trial that caused him to take his life.

In 2010, while he was a research fellow at Harvard, Swartz wrote a script to download a massive number of academic research papers from the database JSTOR. He didn't disseminate any of it—some think he would have eventually; others believe he was using big pieces of data for a research project—but he was still arrested for it. JSTOR, at the time, was behind a paywall.

That was when District Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant DA Stephen Heymann, who still have their jobs, threw the book at him until he was buried underneath it. JSTOR issued a letter saying they would not seek prosecution. Ortiz and Heymann weren't hearing it. They wanted a plea deal. Swartz didn't want to admit guilt.

Ignoring federal sentencing guidelines, Heymann, who still has his job, sought to put Swartz in jail for seven years. According to Swartz's father in Knappenberger's film, Heymann allegedly told others he wanted to make an example out of Swartz.

On January 11, 2013, Swartz killed himself instead. He was 26.

Last year, JSTOR made its entire database free to the public anyway.

After his death, media—especially the parts of the landscape Swartz helped create, like Reddit and the social Web—finally started to catch on: The keys to change are in unbridled, unlimited access to information. Corporations and the courts and the government don't want that change—it will shine a light on corruption and potentially cap profits—and all three will often intimidate dissenters to make sure that information is harder to attain.

"Openness is at the heart of it," says Knappenberger.

That's, in part, why he made his movie, The Internet's Own Boy. The world finally has the tools to band together and fight back against greed and unchecked power. Swartz's death was the catalyst. A man like that wouldn't be bullied to death today without a lot more outcry.

This content is imported from Vimeo. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"He didn't live to see the Snowden revelations. I wish he did. I wish he'd seen that battle. I wish he'd been a force in that battle. It's impossible not to recognize his absence in that," says Knappenberger. "I think he'd be happy, but with an understanding that there's a lot of work to be done. And I think in the net neutrality bid, he'd be vocal.

"There has been this big backlash. But we have to ask ourselves: Do we want an Internet that is a tool for government surveillance? Do we want one where corporations extract private data from us solely for the purpose of selling more things? Do we want an Internet where oppressive regimes can squash their dissidents, or do we want an Internet where dissidents can crawl their way back against oppressive regimes instead?"

There will be no going back and saving Aaron Swartz, but in the process of combating the nonstop greed of telecoms like Comcast—who want to throttle Internet speeds in order to create for-profit fast and slow lanes—and surveillance by the NSA, something remarkable happened:

Regular people were forced to look forward to see what the Internet can become, and those people found that it is the path to the Jetsons-esque, sci-fi future they've always envisioned.

"We've been thinking of the Internet as the thing we've been using for 20 years, but we now know it's much bigger than that. We need to get beyond the idea that the Internet is this place that we blog—end of story—and start thinking of it as the data flow that moves our daily lives," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of "The Googlization of Everything."

That means cars with "constant data flowing through them and communicating with one another," says Vaidhyanathan. It means automated homes. It means more comfortable lives. It means smarter people. It means a more transparent and, with hope, less deceitful government.

"The FCC keeps regulating for last year's model, but this is about things we can't even comprehend," says Vaidhyanathan. "It's about doing our best to ensure creativity, innovation, openness and free speech in all of these systems we haven't yet imagined."

If these threads all seem unconnected—if net neutrality and Edward Snowden's NSA leaks and Aaron Swartz's open information zeal all sound like stories independent from one another—they're not. They're all about one thing: Making information easier to access for everyone, so that people can be better, and corruption can be outed faster.

"The good stuff is based on neutrality. The fight against it is the worst of our democracy—the worst of who we are," Knappenberger says.

It's only been one year since Edward Snowden's first leak. Revelations are still pouring out. Yesterday, the Washington Post let out even more: The NSA was far more likely to be tracking "love and heartbreak, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes" of average citizens than foreign terrorists.

But it wasn't a surprise anymore. It wasn't a surprise because the government's war on information is losing, and corruption is losing along with it.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io