Hard copy for future reference, in case some sort of vulnerability becomes exploitable at a later date. Also, to provide a vague, yet seemingly impressive metr

Hard copy for future reference, in case some sort of vulnerability becomes exploitable at a later date. Also, to provide a vague, yet seemingly impressive metric, true to form for federal government employees, because it seems official to the non-technical layman. If you were to declare a metric such as 900KB of encyphered base64, well, gee, that's like, almost nothing. But print it out, and non-expert jurors start thinking "Well, gee! 700 pages is longer than that Stephen King book that I just read!" And anyway, they wouldn't have to print it out, to obtain a quotable metric. All they'd have to do is paste it into an evidence template, and prep it in a printable format, like a DOCX file or a PDF. Then, they can subpoena for the metadata, and at least maybe infer a relationship between entities, even if they are denied awareness of the nature of the conversations etween them. Seriously, this is how government officials and lawyers tend to think.