What they are talking about is physically impossible. I worked on those systems, and there is no local data storage other than cache on a hard drive. The data is held in multiple locations and moved offsite. It is a felony to destroy the data unless ordered to do so under a HSPD, and the data can not be detroyed without Presidential authorization at about 5 difference levels of Management and Sysadmins.
What this means is that the entire Federal Government top to bottom is corrupted. No Sysadmin would do this of his own accord, or else he’d spend the rest of his life in pound me in the ass Federal Prison- not to mention never working again in IT.
Not only that, the entire focus of an administrative type's life is their email.
The regular IT people at my wife's employer weren't trusted to clone her old machine to a new machine.
I had to do it.
And there were two copies. And they're still hanging around here somewhere, eating Gigs on my backup machines.
Been there and done that same as this guy. Everything he says is true. Weekly backups have to be encrypted and moved off-site for disaster recovery purposes.