This is a very important detail of the whole dreary affair. As surprising as the cause of the whole matter may be, the government after that willfully lied to anyone and everyone, including the judge of the court case, ignored legally binding orders and probably broke several laws. The Paper's Please blog has an excellent timeline of this case:
What's amazing is that I'm well familiar with the details of this story, but Wired's reporting of it was so dry and disinteresting that I didn't associate the names or facts with the case I was already aware of.
What's sad is that I didn't even need to know the facts to agree that what you said was true.
I wonder if there are any public APIs for those "TSDB, TIDE, CLASS, KSTF, TECS, IBIS, TUSCAN, TACTICS" etc. databases. Would be interesting to look at the data.
What are the acronyms?
http://papersplease.org/wp/category/papers-please/