If you store the documents as TIFF files of pages scanned at 5000dpi (about what a good flim negative scanner does), you could accumulate the gigabytes pretty quickly.
Then just assume that some FBI contracting officer's brother in law sells high-capacity hard drives, and I can see how it all happens....
Not that working for the govt has made me cynical or anything. Certainly not like just this morning I saw an IT manager suggest that the solution to a minor, very low-risk security concern with remote web email access is to issue all 2,000 employees a government laptop to take home and connect back to work with a VPN. It would only cost a few million after all, and surely it is more secure to have all those government laptops potentially lost or stolen than to use Microsoft's remote email access which, while secure, doesn't use exactly the same authentication technology that my agency's IT people prefer to use.
Current Events » in reply to Can somebody tell me...
Depends on how you store the documents....