I don't understand what you mean by 'whether we trust them to decide what the public gets to know.' That's a question we're supposed to be asking the governments who have withheld this information, not the whistle blowers. Shifting the focus of these leaks to whether or not the whistle blowers should be hung or not is a great way to deflect focus from the actual things that were leaked. You'd think that a threat to the 4th amendment would register higher on people's radar, but the human interest piece is compelling.

Whether the information should have been leaked or not is an interesting question, but ultimately a 'what if' scenario. The important question is what we do with this information. Or, if you're the government, how to get the people to not care.