Edit: Ahh, hackernews, the tumblr sister site where inconvenient truth means downvotes :D
Hacker News - The little island that is not corrupted by sarcasm and sensationalism.
I have found Hackernews as one of the islands that really acts still like penguins. Strong engineering culture, and just like penguins people just love guarding their rocks and throwing poo at others, just in certain style that is very typical to technical communities. Sarcasm should be the last of issues when compared to that.
The information is being released by 100 different news organizations in 100 different countries. It has nothing to do with protecting their jobs from "Internet sleuths", it's having professional journalistic standards.
There is a reason why publicly available information is useful (think about historians for instance), and by locking it for these only 100 orgs (which will then forget about it in half a year when the scandal is done) you lose on the opportunity to do future research, books, etc. on this