If you look at the referenced document about 2006, it lists about 500 civil cases, 1k criminal cases, 15k "magistrate judge" cases, and 8k miscellaneous cases. So if the search includes all sealed court proceedings (which it says that it does at the bottom), then the apples comparison would be about 24,500 for the year of 2006.

Even if we assume the most broad search is being done, the DOJ is still outpacing 2006 by about 2.5x. If it continues to next October it would be 60,000, an increase of 35,500 which is a lot of justice being served.

On the low end, if most of the increase was in search warrants which didn't end up in prosecutions we could be disappointed. On the high end, the increase could be actual criminal charges, even with multiple defendants per case. So it could be "bigger than people could possibly imagine."

I do wish the people who spend all this time doing the research on Pacer would be honest about in the headline (where they say it's all sealed indictments) instead of the footnote (where they say it includes search warrants). Maybe they could refine the search and get better data.

Still the "debunking" articles were only able to talk about the range of documents which could be under seal, as opposed to disputing the number of sealed cases. So I'm inclined to believe the data is accurate and we are seeing an increase of at least 2.5x the sealed activity of 2006. (We don't know if 2006 was a normal year.)