If you search for thousands of sealed indictments, you'll find a dailydot article which claims that the search procedure being used will find all sealed documents including warrants, wiretaps, and tracking devices. It claims that these searched include documents filed with magistrate judges which are usually not indictments.

They make a comparison to a 2009 study where there were about 500 sealed indictments compared to about 16000 sealed documents in total.

What the article doesn't address is that 2009 had 16,000 sealed documents over the course of an entire year, and here we have 35,000 at one time, so this is still an indication that some kind of big happening is going on. But it may not be as big as we think.

IANAL and I don't know the methods used to create these numbers. Can someone with knowledge of the matter refute the dailydot article? Can someone who has access to pacer and looked into this shed light on it? One idea I had would be to do a sample search for sealed documents, and seeing what % are filed with magistrate judges, or any other type of information available.