Climate Scientists Copying Government Data to Non-government Servers? Is that legal?

Hmm this doesn't sound like it is legal.

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”

That data was generated by tax payer money. How are they able to just put it in the open like that? I think it is a good idea to have the data backed up for the sake of posterity but it walking off like that is a cause for concern.