Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who reviewed the documents, said it would most likely have taken hundreds or perhaps thousands of extra messages to produce the type of "surge" described in the F.B.I.'s internal reports.
"Our sewage infrastructure isn't designed to handle this type of storm surge," Dr. Kenward said.
Counterterrorism has long been a dominant theme of military first-person shooters, but since Sept. 11, the demand for this type of game has surged.
It is a type of surge described as a seiche, which would have picked up everything in its path and dumped it into the jumbled collection of specimens now being reported by the team.
Intense depressions such as tropical cyclones can generate a type of surge called a meteotsunami, which raises water heights very suddenly at the shoreline.
Resettlement agencies are eager to accept as many refugees as the government will allow, but any type of surge "taxes our structure," said Mark Hetfield, chief executive of HIAS, one of the nine resettlement agencies. .
In Moscow, a debate over the impact of this type of development flared up several years ago but has since dissipated, partly because demand for such space has surged, and partly because the new economy is well entrenched there.
