That kind of makes sense. The internet sleuths would analyze it in minutes further than the reporters ever could. They like their jobs so they insist on keeping that data to themselves.
Edit: Ahh, hackernews, the tumblr sister site where inconvenient truth means downvotes :D
Well, it is actually pretty interesting how the information has been managed in case. The press wants their own piece after they lost the previous major leaks completely. It's actually pretty relevant discussion about the future of an industry that has been in slow decline for the last decades. In case someone interprets that as sarcasm or sensationalism that is probably an attitude problem, or perhaps an issue with low media interpretation skills.
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 press wants their own piece after they lost the previous major leaks completely.
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.
What pisses me off is that after they are done going through the data, they often still don't release the files.
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
The newspaper leading in this investigation has been very open to research of such data it received in the past – not just opening the data, but also funding it.
