Sounds like a problem of policy really at the core - maybe when we get some more nerds in Congress this will be finally addressed? Seems like this could just b

Sounds like a problem of policy really at the core - maybe when we get some more nerds in Congress this will be finally addressed? Seems like this could just be a government run database (assuming these businesses are paying taxes and not completely shady) with some of it publicly accessible. Have you tried also looking at US shipment logs? I know there is that guy who a few years ago made a site that scraped and indexed all of the public shipping logs (anything crossing US borders by land or sea goes into huge public databases - for some reason air is excluded). Could be a way to cross reference this data to fill in the blanks for some of the things you are talking about?