Given the treatment of past whistle blowers by the current administration (See J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and Diane Roark), I don't blame him for running to these countries.

And as I understand it, he's already given what most, if not all, of what he knows to the Guardian, and they are just choosing to slowly release the information.

The definition of whistle blower is "an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it", which makes this whole argument a little pointless, depending on your definition of "informant".

However, I would say that Snowden is more a whistle blower because he brought the information to the attention of the American people rather than covertly delivering it to another nation or party. Whistle blowers are supposed to expose government overreach, and I think that is exactly what Snowden did.