It's not really a bogus case at all. The message that these submissions are supposed to be sending is not that any of these people did not in fact commit crimes

It's not really a bogus case at all. The message that these submissions are supposed to be sending is not that any of these people did not in fact commit crimes but that the ruthless pursuit of these individuals is immoral given the intent. Besides, there's no way for you to know how much it would cost NASA in time or money to double and triple check the integrity of their systems. $41k doesn't even sound like a whole lot of money for such a chore.