"the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here."

looking back at all the articles recently published on HN about it, this has undoubtedly happened here as well in a sense.

My feeling is that people are already starting to somehow forget about the revelations by replacing them in their mind with the engaging story of a whistleblower on the run.