I wonder who they pissed off with this? My first guess would be Oracle, but it's merely a guess.
"and that’s a particular worry for Oren Falkowitz, one of the developers of the database, who has left the NSA to start Sqrrl, a company that seeks to build a business around Accumulo in much the same way Red Hat built one around the Linux operating system."
The real cashcow is their hyper-expensive Oracle DB and Application Server products. They'd use political lobbying to protect the marketshare and billions in revenue.
I wonder what's the story behind that.
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/big-data/index.html
Accumulo also uses Hadoop.
edit: I will say I'm not familiar enough with the timelines for all 3 projects to know if that is possible, however, I'd imagine Wired would have had been a bit more vocal if there were specific corporate interests they could have tied to the story.