We already knew that the Koch brothers have planned a massive investment in the 2016 presidential race that will rival the Republican Party’s expenditures. And we already know that they’ve engaged in a hugely successful campaign to reshape politics at the state and local level. But Politico is reporting today that their political activity goes even deeper: these guys have their own intelligence network.

The competitive intelligence team has a staff of 25, including one former CIA analyst, and operates from one of the non-descript Koch network offices clustered near the Courthouse metro stop in suburban Arlington, Va. It has provided network officials with documents detailing confidential voter-mobilization plans by major Democrat-aligned groups. It also sends regular “intelligence briefing” emails tracking the canvassing, phone-banking and voter-registration efforts of labor unions, environmental groups and their allies, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO and interviews with a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the group. … In addition to delving into the left, the competitive intelligence team also monitors potential Koch network threats, according to sources familiar with it. It tracks people deemed suspicious outside the offices of Koch network groups, circulating be-on-the-lookout photos to internal network email lists, while keeping an eye on the network’s own ranks for possible leakers or disloyal employees.

As one organizer who previously worked in the unit described it, the network is like “a full opposition research operation, only at about 10-times the level of any political campaign.” Political organizations, especially political parties, spend quite a bit of money keeping tabs on each other. But expressly political organizations, especially political parties, have limits on just how much meddling is too much meddling (see: Watergate).

The Kochs are under no such constraints. While it would be a Very Big Deal for, say, the Democratic Party to get caught spying on Republicans and gathering intel about their field campaign strategies (which wouldn’t be that hard, considering that all they’d have to do is sit next to the guy at Starbucks with the elephant sticker on their laptop), the Kochs are just private businessmen spending their privately-earned money the way they see fit. If that includes tilting the scales to suit their business interests, then so be it.

It’s also worth noting that, while analogous groups do exist on the left, they don’t come close to approaching this level of scale or audacity. Just imagine the level of outrage on the right if they found out that George Soros was not only sending trackers to political events, but was also collecting data on where activists for conservative organizations were tweeting from.

We’d have congressional hearings for years.