Actually, it’s worse than that.

IT should be understood that Mann and the guys like him aren’t
setting out to be evil, their bad behavior is mostly due to their
promotion way above their competence and their struggles with
things beyond their ability.

For example, Mann’s use of PCA was deeply flawed. He didn’t work
with any good stats guys and made a bunch of novice mistakes. IT
would have been one thing if doing the stats right had kept the
hockey stick intact. However, a proper analysis would have
basically shown useless noise that didn’t say much.

So he tried to hide away the data. Unfortunately, he didn’t ask
anybody knowledgable about how computer systems work to hide the
data from prying eyes while sharing it with his friends. So he
fucked up and he posted stuff on an insecure FTP server… in a
directory labeled CENSORED. One which was set to allow google to
crawl it and index it.

I strongly encourage everyone to read a copy of the Hockey Stick
Illusion by AW Montford (a libertarian who is world famous in
England), which documents the whole sordid tale.