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[T]he lever of potential monetary penalties could be useful in persuading senior government officials to come clean. Ms. Mitchell is hopeful that, even if the Justice Department sits on its hands, a combination of private lawsuits and congressional investigations can help ascertain who gave the order to target conservatives.
Here's an idea. How about if the same "big data" techniques are used to investigate the IRS that the IRS and the NSA use to investigate individual citizens?
It was revealed last week, for example, that the NSA has in its possession massive amounts of "metadata" for telephone calls placed by private individuals. What better use could be made of this data than to mine it to discover which phone calls IRS employees placed to which other individuals during the period under investigation. Metadata for emails should be subjected to similar analysis. Whom did IRS employees send emails to and whom did they receive them from? Social media data should also be mined to determine whether individual IRS employees, perhaps as members of public service employee unions, showed any signs that they harbored prejudices against Tea Party groups.
For example, one question that could be answered is: Did any telephone calls take place or were any emails exchanged between individuals in the Cincinnati office of the IRS and members of the Obama campaign's analytics team during the time when the IRS was targeting conservative groups? If there were any such calls, this would suggest that members of the Obama campaign team exercised political influence on the IRS.
Since it is just "metadata" or data in the public domain, all of this information should be obtainable without search warrant. Once various pieces of data have been joined together and "suspicious patterns" have been identified, search warrants can be obtained to find out more about the contents of individual phone calls or emails.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
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