Hyperbole?
The Pentagon collected 2.5 terabytes of information on Atta? And that amount of data is the "equivalent of about one quarter of the information of our Library of Congress!"? I think that is way too much.
Some interesting stats from Ask Yahoo! on the the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive:
But let's put things in a digital perspective. According to the Internet Archive, if you converted all the text in the Library of Congress (that's words, not pictures) into digital format, it would equal about 20 terabytes (or 20,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica). In October 2001, the Internet Archive's collection of online data contained about 10 billion web pages -- over 100 terabytes of data and growing. Of course, this includes home pages, personal pet pages, and usenet newsgroups, as well as electronic books and Ph.D. theses.
So, words alone, 2.5 terabytes is about one-eight of the size of the Library of Congress, not one-fourth, or about 2,500 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I would have to take 379,918 6.9 MB RAW photos of Atta from my Canon PowerShot G6 digital camera to collect that much data. That is one photo per 1.5 seconds for 6.6 days without stopping.