Reply #50: Basically the idea is for it to be too spread out to deal with

[Posteritatis]

If I have a sheet of paper containing Embarrassing Secrets on it, someone can take said page and lock me up or fire me into the Sun or whatever and nobody'll be able to hear about the contents.

If I read the contents of said piece of paper on live national television, on the other hand, there's nothing that can be done to prevent it from remaining out in the open.

The key to decrypt the file is basically graven in stone; it can't be changed and the type of encryption in particular is the sort of thing that, say, the entire computer collection owned by all DUers could work on cracking for a couple hundred years before having a reasonable shot at breaking it. (I'm not exaggerating. Modern encryption is ... potent.) If I had a copy of it on my computer, or on a USB key in my attic or whatnot, there isn't anything that could be done to deal with it, and I'd be able to open it whenever I wanted to if I got a hold of the key.

Making the insurance file publicly available is sort of the equivalent of reading the piece of paper on national television - there's copies of it all over the place now, utterly impossible to reliably destroy. Of course, we can't read them yet, but one utterance of the decryption key in the right place would have the same effect.