Well, the technology certainly does exist to lock it out, as you said in (2).

I just encountered this today. I had an access card that I got yesterday, worked until after closing, so just kept it. About noon or so, it suddenly would not unlock to doors to my work area.

When I took it down to security, they expalined that all visitor's cards are encoded with an expiration time/date just in case one gets out the door.

FWIW