With all due respect I think I disagree with you on to readership numbers today. Due to circumstances of this 'event', I think there is more news flying around here than a person just sitting and watching a single channel in his/her office could ever hope to get. If some is raw scanner news you could say it is public, but it is sometimes wrong and could get people needlessly concerned. Guess you could look at IP addresses on web servers over the next few weeks to see if that is case, however. Just my opinion.
I think you vastly overestimate our significance. The threat of some bad guy listening in nil and the media can hear the scanners the same as us. This is PUBLIC, not private information.