There's also some background to the apparent boneheadedness of this email:
I think this overemphasizes a bit the concerns about McIntyre's potential "misuse" of the data as opposed to resisting the demands on time and effort from a party that has mostly engaged in innuendo and harassment. Gavin Schmidt at the RealClimate blog has often noted that even after data and code requested from his institution was made readily accessible, essentially nothing came of it: no auditing, no improvements, no criticisms, just demands for more data, and user support.
Also the problem of ocean and atmospheric data associated with British institutions being commercially encumbered with restrictions on distribution is a longstanding annoyance in the field (FWIW, I understand the FOI requests were denied on that basis anyway). By contrast pretty much any large dataset I've heard of from US institutions is available on the web with the necessary tools.
-- Andy