>Working off of a list provided by the Fed of news organizations participating in last week's lock up, CNBC contacted each of the news organizations that offer low latency data services to ask whether they transmitted any data out of the Fed's lockup room. A key question is whether or not any organization transmitted information out of the lockup room and into its own computer system before 2 p.m. If that was done, the data could have been moved to computer servers near Chicago before 2 p.m. and publicly released the information from there at precisely 2 p.m. – enabling subscribers of that data service to get the information milliseconds before others in Chicago relying on transmissions from the Federal Reserve in Washington to arrive.

Sounds like the most reasonable explanation to me.

But of course I'm not 100% sure what a lock-up room is. It's being described as reporters restricted from speaking before 2pm. Obviously, that has nothing to do with millisecond precision.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101056168