The recent release of documents from the East Anglia University by a "hacker" could very well have been an inside job.  Two comments on The Volokh Conspiracy make interesting points about the circumstances of the release that point towards the release of the data by someone inside the institution:

lucklucky points out: Yes it appears an inside job, the initial nick of the person that released them was FOIA and reasons stated is that this shouldn’t be hidden from public.

While that's an interesting, but weak argument on its own, it gets stronger when put in context with this point from GaryC:

The last date on an email message is November 12, 2009.

On November 13, 2009, Steve McIntyre was informed that his FOI request for data, much of which is in this data package, had been rejected.

That doesn’t “prove” anything, but it certainly suggests that an insider who was aware of the contents of the data package, because he (or she) had been involved in assembling it to respond to the FOI request, decided to act as a whistleblower. The probability that it was an outside hacker seems very low, at least to me.

Scientists should be furious about this clear breach of scientific process and ethics by the climatologists at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.  Most scientists I know are highly ethical people who would never dream of putting an ideology above their scientific integrity and I believe they would be capable of being a whistleblower in this situation.   All of this data, collected no doubt with public funds, should be in the public domain.  Governments are proposing to make multi-trillion dollar changes to their economies that will touch every single person in the world.  This is just too important to allow some suspect data to guide this decision.  It goes without saying that all research data should be posted publicly as well, the same way evidence produced in a courtroom is in the public domain.  Stay tuned.