US politician Aaron Schock has been the subject of some innovative digging by the Associated Press in a particularly fascinating example of how media metadata can be matched with public records and website data:

“The AP tracked Schock’s reliance on the aircraft partly through the congressman’s penchant for uploading pictures and videos of himself to his Instagram account. The AP extracted location data associated with each image then correlated it with flight records showing airport stopovers and expenses later billed for air travel against Schock’s office and campaign records.”

The article explains that “earlier rules prohibited lawmakers from using … accounts to pay for flights on private aircraft, allowing payments only for federally licensed charter and commercial flights.”