It’s easy to go after the whistleblower, especially given how the left loves them. But I hate the idea that whatever the gubmint declares secret just is, and they are the final judge. Most of the time it isn’t troop movements or anything that could conceivably hurt us, except in a PR sense. They like to cover their assessed. Then 20 years later they say, “Oh, by the way, you know that Gulf of Tonkin thing? Yeah, we were in their waters, oops...We broke Japanese diplomatic and military codes but didn’t bother telling Kimmel and Short, sorry...the Germans warned us they’d fire on ships carrying munitions, and the Lusitania wasn’t just carrying passengers and was left unprotected...etc.”
I was the exact same MOS as this flamer. He knew going in that ANY release of classified information entrusted to him was punishable by the UCMJ. You can’t be a “whistleblower” in intelligence, it doesn’t work that way, especially with clasified documents. I am still bound by secrecy even though I got out 30 years ago and cannot travel to communist countries without prior permission of the government. If he didn’t like the homosexuality policy of the military at that time, he could’ve either waited until his ETS or went to his first sergeant and said “I’m gay and I want out” and he’d have been a civilian with an honorable discharge and unemployment benefits & GI Bill in less than two weeks. But no, now he’s on trial and will likely do at least 10 years of hard time with a dishonorable discharge to boot. He chose poorly.
As they say in intelligence, most of the secret information is obtained from public sources. For example, the traitor published an order of food for a closed meeting at the embassy. He may have looked at it and found nothing of interest at all - why not to publish it? However a foreign intelligence service would be quick to note that there is only one person who might be there who likes a certain exotic food - and that food was on order. Guess what, that person was invited - a valuable information, and other people can now take it further.
To declassify something you need to know the reasons why the information was classified to begin with. Then you can check if those reasons are no longer true, and that no new reasons showed up. A single soldier in a shack in the middle of nowhere does not, cannot (or at least shouldn't) have access to all that information - and even if he does he doesn't have the attention span or skills to properly consider all the implications. Old records are declassified all the time, but it takes a lot of effort. You cannot just rubberstamp a DVD full of data as unclassified, sight unseen. This guy did just that, without authority and without a good reason. That's not how things are done ... anywhere, not just in the army.