Why enter an obvious password?
Most of the contact information on this website is generally available to the public (ie; phone book) but we do not want to make obtaining your email address easy.
Having to enter a password stops web crawlers from harvesting information and serves as a deterrent for pranksters.
OK, what's a web crawler? Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, have written programs to automatically search the internet for information. Information is retrieved and then stored in a database for later use. These are commonly refered to as web crawlers, spiders or robots (bots).
Since a crawler runs without any human monitor or intervention, once it reaches the password prompt, it stops and takes another path.