I find it interesting that "perjury" isn't mentioned. The chastening by the court means little if the government suffers no ill effects from lying under oath.
At a guess, this is because may not be immediately obvious who committed perjury. Not everyone on the government side is necessarily on the same page, and over the 5-year lifetime of this case several of the people involved may have changed jobs.
The US attorney representing the FBI in court might have been acting in good faith, for example, because someone within the FBI had decided that neither the court nor the attorney had a 'need to know' about the existence of other documents. Establishing exactly who made that decision and how many other people knew about it and when they knew etc. etc. will require a separate investigation. (I have only read the opinion so far, and not looked at the procedural history of the case which might answer some of those questions.)
My understanding is that there are a few costs to the government when this happens. There's an investigation as mentioned above, which can take years. In the short term, the government may have to pay some or all of the plaintiff's legal costs - that can also take years, but it has an immediate effect on agencies' budget planning. Lastly, either the government appeals or the decision will be cited in existing or future litigation about similar issues.
I have a hunch that there will be a huge amount of information- and security-related litigation against the government for the next 5-10 years. Now that Osama bin Laden is gone there will be increasing domestic pressure to reassess foreign policy, military commitments, and the role of security in public life. People are tired of the war on terror and the security theater that goes with it, and bin Laden's death is a sufficiently large milestone that legal and legislative debates will broaden considerably. 'But al qaeda' will no longer substitute for an actual argument as it has for most of the last 10 years.
Edit: I'm probably downvoted for lack of information; it's Obama's speech announcing the death of Osama and changes to USA policies similar to that of parent's last paragraph.
Exactly. Oh no! Somebody got a stern talking-to. I am sure they learned their lesson. This is akin to a cop that murders an innocent bystander and gets a 10 day suspension with pay as punishment instead of 25 years in jail.
Courts do not file charges or spin off criminal proceedings in the middle of an ongoing civil trial - it's not like forking something on GitHub. I think the Office of the Inspector General inside the DoJ would appoint a prosecutor whose job it would be to investigate and file charges if appropriate. Alternatively, Congress also has powers to initiate investigations of the executive branch.
People do sometimes go to jail for this sort of thing, but it's rarely front page news because the cases are so technical, and because the prosecutions take so long that the general public usually ends up losing interest, if they ever had any to begin with. Here's a recent example: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0311/033111RB1.htm
