Each time a shipment comes into port, it gets documented through a bill of lading. Since we're looking into shipping as a method of transport, I wonder if we could find anything useful in these records. They are publicly available through the Freedom of Information Act. Information available includes:

-Shipper

-Consignee

-Notify Party

-Commodity Description

-Marks

-Date

-Origin

-Destination

-and more.

This site Has a post that explains it well, and also mentions that there are some companies that try to avoid having their documents made public. I can see how legitimate companies would want to keep them secret if they disclosed things that would give away a competitive advantage, but surely that would be a strategy used by criminals as well. I'm not sure if they're able to keep the information from being public altogether, or just prevent it from being released to the data mining companies.

Here is one such data mining company. $350/month, mandatory 12 month subscription to access their data. They do have some reports available for free though](http://www.datamyne.com/free-report-library/))

This appears to be a site that has full information freely available, although I haven't tried it.

Ways that companies might try to hide their info

There are many smarter people around here with more time to dedicate to this than I have, so I'll leave it up to you to see if it's possible to find any new leads or evidence in this info.