She was a whistleblower, hence everyone with a hint of credibility saying she was.
Also, it's customary on HN to point out when you have a conflict of interest. You work for a military contractor & used to work for the government, and probably should disclose that when talking about a subject so closely tied to your work.
It's a form of personal attack to bring in someone's personal history as ammunition in an argument. You can't do that on HN, regardless of how strongly you feel about some other commenter or their work. No amount of personal upbraiding is worth the damage it does to the container. Please don't do it again.
The case of using someone's employer or field to shame them is particularly bad for this site, because it disincentivizes people from showing up where they have the most expertise. It's true that we're all strongly biased by our work, so some distortion is inevitable, but having HN be a place where people feel free to show up on topics that they're knowledgeable in is more important than policing each other for bias.
We're also trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture on HN in general.
> You work for a military contractor & used to work for the government, and probably should disclose that when talking about a subject so closely tied to your work.
How do you know that? I don't see anything in their profile. Was it a post that they made?
Whistleblower is commonly understood to uncover illegal, criminal or otherwise punishable activity within the organization, that is being hidden. Thus the metaphor of "blowing the whistle" - as in, attracting attention to something untoward going on. However, just releasing secret documents which do not contain the proof of any specific criminal, or otherwise untoward, behavior is not "whistleblowing". For example, Manning released 251,287 US Diplomatic cables and 482,832 Army reports - unless you consider the whole US Diplomatic corps and US Army to be a criminal enterprises, this goes way beyond whistleblowing, as described above.
I mean do you understand what it is that she "leaked"? Her intentions were obviously good, she was blowing the whistle on the government committing war crimes, at her own expense, no benefit. She may have not gone through proper channels, but you can't even really expect to be protected by those systems anyway. A "leak" is generally done for some kind of personal benefit or simply to cause harm and has no noble intention. the information leaked did not put anyone in danger but did expose crimes committed by the military. She should never have been jailed in the first place, free her.
A 'whistleblower' has protections gained by following the correct procedure to identify improper/criminal behavior first. If those actions result in punishment you can bring a suit against the offending party.
A more precise term would be leaker, as somebody who commits a data breach or spillage (military term). Manning did release evidence that appears to constitute a potentially criminal act, however the quantity and material subject of information leaked greatly exceeded any single, or collection of, criminal acts at 750,000 unrelated items.
A whistleblower is a subset of leaking with the limited intention of exposing something specifically nefarious.