Bank of America Buys Domains

In some form of preparation for what WikiLeaks may be releasing soon regarding Bank of America, they are buying a large number of domains, mostly in the style of either bank's name or a bank officer's name and a variety of derogatory terms, i.e., xxxblows, etc. I assume the idea is to keep other folks from taking over these domain names and creating anti-BOA sites, but I have to wonder about their strategy in this. Or maybe they just don't understand enough about search engines to realize that the domain name is only a small part of how search engines rank sites. But, knock yourselves out, B of A.